He looked down from his window in the morning into a garden of tangled
and neglected vegetation sparkling with dew. Over the trees beyond the
road lay the Gulf, a sheet of azure and misty gray. He looked at it and
endeavoured to bring his thoughts into some sort of practical order
while he shaved and dressed. The adventure of the previous evening,
however, was so fresh and disturbing that he could do nothing save
return to it again and again. At intervals he would pause and stand
looking out, thinking of Evanthia in a mood of extraordinary delight.
She must be, he reflected, one of the most wonderful creatures in the
world. He had not believed it possible that any woman could so transmute
the hours for him into spheres of golden radiance. The evening had
passed like a dream. Indeed, he was in the position of a man whose
dreams not only come true but surpass themselves. His dreams had been
only shabby travesties of the reality. He recalled the subtle fragrance
of her hair, the flash of her amber eyes, the sensuous delicacy and
softness of her limbs and bosom, the melodious timbre of her voice. And
he paused longer than usual as he reflected with sudden amazement that
she was his for the taking. The taking! How deliciously mysterious she
had been as she made it clear he must take her away, far away, where
nobody knew who she was, where they could be happy for ever together!
How she had played upon the strong chords of his heart as she spoke of
her despair, her loneliness, her conviction that she was destined for
ill fortune! She injected a strange strain of tragic intensity into the
voluptuous abandon of her voice. She evoked emotions tinged with a kind
of savage and primitive religious mania as she lay in his arms in the
scented darkness of that garden and whispered in her sweet twittering
tones her romantic desires. And the thought that she was even now lying
asleep in another room, the morning sun filtering through green shutters
and filling the chamber with the lambent glittering beam-shot twilight
of a submarine grotto, was like strong wine in his veins. She depended
on him, and he was almost afraid of the violence of the emotion she
stirred in him. She had touched, with the unerring instinct of a clever
woman, his imagination, his masculine pride and the profound
sentimentalism of his race towards her sex. She revealed to him a phase
in her character so inexpressibly lovely and alluring that he was in a
trance. She inspired in him visions of a future where he would always
love and she be fair. Indeed, Mr. Spokesly's romantic illusions were
founded on fact. Evanthia Solaris was possessed of a beauty and
character almost indestructible. She was preëminently fitted to survive
the innumerable casualties of modern life. She was a type that Ada
Rivers, for example, would not believe in at all, for girls like Ada
Rivers are either Christian or Hebrew, whereas Evanthia Solaris was
neither, but possessed the calculating sagacity of a pagan oracle. Such
a catastrophe as the departure of the consuls had enraged her for a
time, and then she had subsided deep into her usual mysterious mood. So
his illusions were founded on fact. She could give him everything he
dreamed of, leaving him with imperishable memories, and passing on with
unimpaired vitality to adventures beyond his horizon. There was nothing
illogical in this. Being an adventuress is not so very different from
being an adventurer. One goes into it because one has the temperament
and the desire for adventure. And Evanthia was by heredity an
adventuress. Her father belonged to that little-known and completely
misunderstood fraternity--the _comitadji_ of the Balkans. It is not yet
comprehended by the western nations that to a large section of these
southeastern people civilization is a disagreeable inconvenience. They
regard the dwellers in towns with contempt, descending upon them in
sudden raids when the snows melt, and returning to their mountain
fortresses laden with booty and sometimes with hostages. They maintain
within political frontiers empires of their own, defying laws and
defeating with ease the police-bands who are sent to apprehend them.
They have no virtues save courage and occasionally fidelity and no
ideals save the acquisition of spoil. They invariably draw to themselves
the high-spirited youths of the towns; and the girls, offered the choice
of drudging poverty or the protection of a farmer of taxes, are
sometimes discovered to have gone away during the excitement of a
midnight foray. So had Evanthia's mother, a lazy, lion-hearted baggage
of Petritch whose parents had breathed more easily when they were free
at last from her incessant demands and gusts of rage. But the man who
had carried her off into the mountains was nearing the end of his
predatory career, and very soon (for he had no enemies, having killed
them all) he was able to purchase a franchise from the Government and
turn tax-farmer himself. He was so successful that he became a rich man,
and the family, fighting every inch of the way, took a villa in Pera. It
was there Evanthia was educated in the manner peculiar to that part of
the world. When she was eighteen she could make fine lace, cook, fight,
and speak six languages without being able to write or read any at all.
The villa in which they lived was for ever in an uproar, for all three
gave battle on the smallest pretext. They lived precisely as the beasts
in the jungle live--diversifying their periods of torpor with bursts of
frantic vituperation and syncopating enjoyment. Neither European nor
Asiatic, they maintained an uneasy balance on the shores of the
Bosphorus between the two, until Evanthia's mother, a vigorous, handsome
brunette trembling with half-understood longings and frustrated
ambitions in spite of her life of animal indolence, suddenly ran away
and took her daughter with her. She had fallen in love with a Greek whom
she had met in Constantinople, a man of forceful personality, enormous
moustaches, and no education, who was selling the tobacco crop from his
estate in Macedonia. Evanthia's father, now a man of nearly sixty, did
not follow them. He suffered a paroxysm of rage, broke some furniture,
and made furious preparations for a pursuit, when one of the servants, a
tall, cool Circassian girl with pale brown eyes and an extraordinarily
lovely figure, broke in upon his frenzy and told him an elaborate story
of how his wife had really gone to France, where she had previously sent
a sum of money, and how she herself had been implored to go with them
but had refused to desert her master. It was quite untrue, and took its
origin from the French novels she had stolen from her mistress and read
in bed; but it hit the mark with the man whose only domestic virtue was
fidelity. And the Circassian creature made him an admirable companion,
ruling the villa with a rod of iron, inaugurating an era of peace which
the old gentleman had never experienced in his life.
Evanthia had to adjust herself to new and startling conditions. The
swart Hellene stood no nonsense from his handsome mistress. He beat her
every day, on the principle that if she had not done anything she was
going to do something. When Evanthia began her tantrums he tried to beat
her, too, but she showed so ugly a dexterity with a knife that he
desisted and decided to starve her out. He cheerfully gave her money to
run away to Saloniki, laughing harshly when she announced her intention
of working for a living as a seamstress. She arrived in Saloniki to hear
stirring news. She was about to enter a carriage to drive to the house
of a friend of the Hellene, a gentleman named Dainopoulos, when a young
man with glorious blond hair and little golden moustache, his blue eyes
wide open and very anxious, almost pushed her away and got in, giving
the driver an address. This was the beginning of her adventures. The
young man explained the extreme urgency of his business, offered to do
anything in his power if she would let him have the carriage at once.
She got in with him, and he told her his news breathlessly: War. It
seemed a formidable thing to him. To her, life was war. She had no
knowledge of what war meant to him in his country. To her London,
Berlin, Paris were replicas of Constantinople, cosmopolitan rookeries
where one could meet interesting men. Saloniki immediately became a
charming place for Evanthia Solaris. The young man was the vice-consul.
His father was a wealthy ship-chandler at Stettin, and he himself had
been everywhere. It was he who first confirmed her vague gropings after
what one might call, for want of a better word, gentility. She was
shrewd enough to suspect that the crude and disorderly squabbling in the
Pera villa, or the grotesque bullying on the tobacco plantation, were
not the highest manifestations of human culture. As has been hinted, she
was sure there were people in the world who lived lives of virtuous
ease, as opposed to what she had been accustomed. Their existence was
confirmed by her new friend. He was the first man she had liked. Later
she became infatuated with him. In between these two periods she learned
to love someone in the world besides herself.
It would not do to say that she, in her barbaric simplicity, assumed
that all Englishwomen lay on their backs and had angelic tempers. But
she did arrive at a characteristically ecstatic conclusion about Mrs.
Dainopoulos. That lady was so obviously, so romantically genteel that
Evanthia sometimes wanted to barter her own superb vitality for some
such destiny. She never considered for a moment, until she met Mr.
Spokesly, the chances of being adored as Mr. Dainopoulos adored his
wife. She knew Mr. Dainopoulos would never dream of adoring a woman like
herself. She regarded him with dislike because he betrayed no curiosity
about herself and because he obviously knew too much to be hoodwinked by
her arts. He even ignored her rather amusing swagger when she paraded
her new acquisition, a handsome vice-consul. She knew he would not have
tolerated her at all had not his wife expressed a desire to have her
remain. Mrs. Dainopoulos had no intention of countenancing evil; but she
had been humane enough to see, when Evanthia told her story, how
impossible it was for a girl with such a childhood to have the remotest
conception of Western ideals. Mrs. Dainopoulos, in fact, belonged to the
numerous class of people in England who manage "to make allowances," as
they call it, for others. And possibly, too, Evanthia, with her bizarre
history and magical personality, possibly even her naïve assumption that
she was destined to be mistress of men, appealed to the Englishwoman's
flair for romance. Evanthia, contrasted with Haverstock Hill, was
wonderful. And to Evanthia, the victim of sudden little spurts of
girlish posing, pathetic strivings after an imaginary western self, the
invalid woman was a sympathetic angel. She never laughed when Evanthia
pretended an absurd lofty patriotism or inaugurated a season of
ridiculous religious observances, dressing in white and holding a
crucifix to her breast. She did not deride Evanthia's remarkable
travesty of English dress, or Evanthia's embarrassing concoctions in the
kitchen. These gusts of enthusiasm died out, and the real Evanthia
emerged again, a velvet-soft being of sex and sinuous delicacy, of no
country and no creed, at home in the world, a thing of indestructible
loveliness and problematic utility.
And now, while Mr. Spokesly stood at his window gently rubbing his chin
and looking down into the dew-drenched garden, Evanthia was lying in
another room, smoking a cigarette and meditating. She had a very astute
and clearly defined plan in her mind, and she lay thinking how it could
be carried out. Unhampered by so many of our modern educational
distractions and complexes, her mental processes would have exacted the
admiration of the London School of Mnemonics. The apparent impossibility
of leaving Saloniki and reaching Constantinople meant nothing at all to
her. It had always been an almost impossible task to go anywhere if one
were a woman. Women, in her experience, were like expensive automobiles.
They were always owned by somebody, who drove them about and sometimes
ill-treated them and even rode them to destruction, and who lost them if
they were not carefully guarded. Moreover, the parallel, in her
experience, went farther, because she observed that nobody ever thought
less of them because they were costly to run. Evanthia was now like an
ownerless machine of which no one perceived the value or knew how to
start. She had been getting accustomed to the notion that independence
had its pleasures and defects. She lay thinking with quiet efficiency,
until her cigarette was burned down, and then suddenly sprang out of
bed. With extraordinary speed and quietness, she rolled up her great
masses of black hair, slipped into a yellow kimono and Turkish slippers,
and went downstairs. The contrast between her pose, with nothing save
the slow curl of smoke coming from the deep pillow to show she was
alive, and the sharp vitality of her movements in the kitchen, was
characteristic. She could not help doing things in a theatrical way. Mr.
Dainopoulos was much nearer the mark than even he knew, when he said in
his caustic way that Evanthia imagined herself a queen. There were times
when she thought she was an empress walking down ivory staircases strewn
with slaughtered slaves. She had a way of striding to the door when she
was angry and turning suddenly upon him, her head lowered, her amber
eyes full of a lambent, vengeful glare. Mr. Dainopoulos would remain as
impassive as a dummy under this exhibition of temperament, but his
attitude was artistically correct. She might be exasperated with him,
but she really regarded him as a dummy. He represented the cowed and
terror-stricken vassal shrinking from the imperial anger. And now she
moved in a majestic way here and there in the great stone kitchen,
making black coffee and spooning out some preserved green figs into a
plated dish. This she arranged on a tray. In imagination she was a great
lady, a grand-duchess perhaps, taking refreshment to a secret lover. She
loved to figure herself in these fantastic rôles, the rôles she had seen
so often at the cinemas. The exaggerated gestures and graphic emotions
came naturally to a girl at once theatrical and illiterate. She walked
away with the tray in her hand, ascending the stairs as though
rehearsing an entrance, and stood stock still outside Mr. Spokesly's
door, listening.
Mr. Spokesly was listening, too. He had heard the slip-slop of the loose
slippers, the tinkle of spoon against china, and then a faint tap. He
went over to the door and pulled it open.
"You!" he said, with a thrill. He could not have said a word more just
then. She smiled and held a finger to pursed lips to enjoin silence. He
stood looking at her, hypnotized.
"Drink coffee with me?" she whispered sweetly, holding up the tray. And
then she moved on along the passage, looking back over her shoulder at
him with that smile which is as old as the world, the first finished
masterpiece of unconscious art.
She led the way to a darkened room, set the tray down, and pushed the
green shutters away, revealing a wooden balcony with chairs and a green
iron table. Below, in the hush of early morning, lay the road, and
beyond the trees and houses that followed the shore they could see the
Gulf, now streaked and splotched with green and gray and rose. The early
morning, charged with the undissipated emotions of the night, is a far
more beautiful hour than the evening. To Evanthia, however, who had
always dwelt amid scenes of extravagant natural beauty, this exquisite
sunrise, viewed as it were in violet shadow, the invisible sun tingeing
the snow of the distant peaks with delicate shell-pink and ivory-white,
the vessels in the roadstead almost translucent pearl in the mist, the
shore line a bar of solid black until it rose ominously in the sullen
headland of Karaburun--all this was nothing. To Mr. Spokesly it was a
great deal. It became to him a memory alluring and unforgettable. It was
a frame for a picture which he bore with him through the years, a
picture of himself on a balcony, listening to a girl in a yellow kimono
while she whispered and whispered and then sat back in her chair and
raised her cup to drink, looking at him over the rim of it with her
brilliant amber eyes.
"I don't know as it can be done," he muttered, shaking his head
slightly, gulping the coffee and setting the cup on the table. "Not so
easy, I'm afraid."
"_You_ can do it," she whispered imperiously.
"S'pose you get caught?" he replied cautiously. She waved a hand and
shrugged.
"_N'importe. C'est la guerre._ That don't matter. You can do it, eh?"
Mr. Spokesly rubbed his chin.
"I don't say I can and I don't say I can't. _He_ might be able to get
you down there as a passenger."
She shook her head vigorously, and leaned over the table, touching it
with her long filbert nails.
"No!" she said. "He says 'no good.' Nobody allowed to go Phyros, nobody
to Alexandria. Nobody. You understand?"
He looked at her as she leaned against the table and then his gaze
dropped to where the yellow wrap had opened so that he could see her
bosom, and he felt a dizziness as he looked away. It was characteristic
of Evanthia that she made no sudden gesture of modesty. She leaned
there, her white throat and breast lifting evenly as she breathed,
awaiting his answer.
"Yes, I understand," he answered, looking out to where the _Kalkis_ was
emerging from the distant haze. "But what I don't see is why you want to
do it."
"I want to go wis you," she whispered sharply, and he looked at her
again to find her gazing at him sternly, her finger on her lips.
And Mr. Spokesly suddenly had an inspiration. Here he was again, mewing
like a kitten for somebody to come and open the door, instead of taking
hold and mastering the situation. He took a deep breath, and lit a
cigarette. He must play up to this. No good fooling about. In for a
penny, in for a pound. Could it be managed? He decided it could. It was
evident Mr. Dainopoulos knew something about it but had no intention of
taking an active part in the adventure. Mr. Spokesly realized he himself
had no notion where the _Kalkis_ was going after discharging in Phyros.
It seemed Evanthia did, or had some notion of it. Yes, it could be
managed. His hand closed over hers as it lay on the table.
"I'll fix everything," he said. "You be ready and I'll do the rest."
Her face grew radiant. She became herself again--a woman who had got
what she wanted. She rose and stroked his hair gently as she bent over
him.
"Now I get some breakfast, _mon cher_," she twittered sweetly. "You stop
here. I call you." And with a soft, sibilant flip-flop of her heelless
slippers, which showed her own pink heels and delicate ankles, she
disappeared.
And Mr. Spokesly, who had come home from distant places to join the
forces, who had become engaged in an exemplary way to a girl who was now
wondering, away in beleaguered England, why Reggie didn't write, tilted
his chair a little and allowed his mind to go forward. When he asked
himself what would be the upshot of this adventure, he was compelled to
admit that he didn't know. What startled and invigorated him was that he
didn't care. He saw himself, as they say, on deck in fine weather, a
full moon pouring her glorious radiance down upon them, and Evanthia
beside him in a deck chair under the awning. He saw himself in some
distant harbour, after much toil and anxiety, sitting at cafés with
bands playing and Evanthia in that corn-coloured dress with an enormous
black hat. And then his thoughts went so far forward that they lost
coherence and he grew dizzy again. His chair was tilted back against the
opened jalousie and he stared with unseeing eyes across the glittering
water. It was the dream he had had before, on the _Tanganyika_, only a
little clearer, a little nearer. They were dead, while he was alive.
There you had it. Perhaps in a little while he, too, would be dead--a
bomb, a shell, a bullet--and the dreams would be for others while he
joined that great army of silent shades. Why had he never seen the
simplicity of it before? This was the mood for adventure. You forgot the
others and went right on, getting the things that are yours for the
taking, never counting the cost, finding your dreams come true....
Then you went back to beleaguered England, and Ada would be there,
waiting.
And then, as he sat there, he came slowly back to the present and saw
that the _Kalkis_ was moving. He saw steam jetting from the forecastle
and that told him they were heaving up the anchor. An obsolete old ship,
he reflected, with the exhaust from the windlass blinding everybody and
making it difficult to see the bridge. The _Kalkis_ began to move.
Now she had way on and was turning towards him. Coming in to a new
berth, Mr. Spokesly noted. He rose, and Mr. Dainopoulos appeared at the
door leading to the balcony.
"You all right, eh?" he inquired, and seeing the empty cups made a
peculiar grimace. He pointed to the _Kalkis_.
"You got a new berth?" said Mr. Spokesly.
"Yeh. Over here," said Mr. Dainopoulos. "It's the best we can get just
now. No room inside. Now," he went on, "You got to go on board, see, and
have a look round. There's two hundred ton to be loaded quick, but I
think her winches, they ain't very good. You let me know. The captain,
he talk plenty about _new_ winches. Where do I get new winches, eh? I
ask you, where do I get 'em, out here?"
This time, when called, Mr. Spokesly was ready.
"We'll get her loaded," he said. "If it's all light general we can do
it, winches or no winches. Is the other mate finished?"
"Just about. He don't get any more pay, anyhow."
Evanthia suddenly came out of the shadow of the room and looked at them
in a theatrical way, as though she were about to begin a big scene and
was waiting for her cue from the rear.
"Breakfast," said Mr. Dainopoulos, upon whom this sort of histrionics
was lost, and they went down to a room on the ground floor, a room that
was full of moving green shadows and pale green beams as the dense
foliage of the garden swayed in the breeze. It was like sitting in a
recess at the bottom of the sea. The slim girl with the contemptuously
taciturn expression was laying the table.
"My wife, she don't come down," said Mr. Dainopoulos, devouring lamb
stew. They might have been in the breakfast room of a home in Haverstock
Hill. Only the figure of Evanthia hissing incomprehensible commands into
the ears of the sullen young girl, who stared at Mr. Spokesly and moved
unwillingly into the kitchen, recalled the adventure behind this little
scene. On the walls were enlarged photographs of the father and mother
of Mr. Dainopoulos, life-size coloured prints in gold frames that were
enclosed in an outer glass case on account of flies. The furniture had
come, at his wife's order, from Tottenham Court Road, and was a glossy
walnut with dark green plush. A giant dresser of black Anatolian oak
which stood against one wall bore on its broad shelves a couple of blue
and green and yellow Armenian vases and a great shining copper tray like
an ancient shield. Across this shield the green sunlight wavered and
shook so that even Mr. Dainopoulos allowed his eye to rest on it. He
wanted to get rid of that dresser and buy one of those white kitchen
cabinets he saw in advertisements. He did not know furniture, strange to
say, or he would have asked an extremely high price for his dresser. He
sat looking at the light playing on the copper shield, which sent it
flying back in a fairy flicker athwart the ceiling, which was dark brown
and riven with huge cracks, and doing a little posing on his account.
"My wife she don't come down," he said. It reminded him of something he
had been going to tell Mr. Spokesly that first night and his wife had
stopped him. Why did she always do that? Always there was something
about the English he couldn't follow. He went on with his lamb stew,
noisily enjoying it, and pretending he did not see Evanthia's rehearsal
of one of her favourite poses, a great madama dispensing hospitality to
her guests in the morning room of her _château_.
"I met a major yesterday," said Mr. Spokesly, "in the Olympos. He said
he wanted me to go and see him about the cargo."
"Eh!" Mr. Dainopoulos stared, knife and fork raised.
"Oh, I fancy he just wants to give us a few hints about the discharging
in Phyros."
"He can do that," said Mr. Dainopoulos, letting his hands fall to the
table. "He can do that. Yes," he went on, seeing the possibilities of
the thing, "you go along and tell him you'll attend to it all yourself,
see? You fix him. The captain, he don't like government peoples."
"I'll go this morning, after I've got some gear."
"It ain't a very long voyage to Phyros," said his employer.
"Where do we go, from Phyros?" asked Mr. Spokesly.
"To Piræus for orders," said the other quickly. Mr. Spokesly could not
help glancing at Evanthia, who regarded him steadily.
"I see," he said. Piræus was the port of Athens. Athens, just then, was
a peculiar place, like Saloniki. So that was it.
"Captain Rannie said he didn't know," he observed. Mr. Dainopoulos
grunted.
"Perhaps he didn't know, when you ask him. I think I got a charter, but
I ain't sure. I take a chance, that's all."
After they had finished and as he was waiting for Mr. Dainopoulos, he
saw Evanthia in the garden, an apron over her pink cotton dress, smoking
a cigarette.
"So it's Athens you want," he said, smiling. She put her finger to her
lips.
"By and by, you will see," she said and led him away down among the
trees. She pulled his head down with a gesture he grew to know well, and
whispered rapidly in his ear. And then pushed him away and hurried off
to look for eggs in the chicken-house. He joined Mr. Dainopoulos in a
thoughtful mood, more than ever convinced that women were, as he put it,
queer. He was so preoccupied that he did not notice the lack of
originality in this conclusion.
Mr. Dainopoulos was thoughtful, too, as they made their way into the
city and he opened his office. He was in a difficulty because he did not
know how far Mr. Spokesly, being an Englishman, could be trusted with
the facts. He was perfectly well aware of the difference between doing a
little business in hashish, which destroyed the soldiers in Egypt body
and soul, and an enterprise such as he had in mind. What would be Mr.
Spokesly's attitude after his interview with the major, and after
getting away to sea? He had said he was taking a chance of a cargo. This
was scarcely true; but he was taking a chance in sending Mr. Spokesly
out ignorant of what was in store for him. But he decided to do it. He
decided to make that drug-rotted old captain of his earn his salt. He
would let Captain Rannie tell Mr. Spokesly after they were at sea.
Scraping his chin with his fingernail as he stood in front of his big
safe, Mr. Dainopoulos felt sure that, out at sea, there would be no
trouble. Then he opened his safe. He would make sure. The major had his
own personal influence, no doubt; and it would be a powerful one if he
exercised it. Mr. Dainopoulos could imagine him engaging Mr. Spokesly's
interest tremendously with the story of those men waiting for their
stores in Phyros. He took out a cash-box, and closing the safe went back
to his desk.
"Listen here, Mister," he said, and suddenly broke off to wave away the
young Jew, who was gazing in upon them with eyes enlarged and charged
with pathos. "Listen here," he went on when the youth had vanished like
a wraith. "I want to fix you so you'll be all right if anything happens,
you understand. I don't know. Perhaps the Government take the _Kalkis_
when she get to Piræus--plenty trouble now in Piræus--and you gotta come
back here. So I pay you six months now. You give me a receipt for six
months' pay."
"What for?" demanded Mr. Spokesly, astonished.
"You understand, easy to cover risks with underwriter, yes. But s'pose I
buy another ship and I got no captain. See?"
Something told Mr. Spokesly, though he did not understand at all, that
money was money. The man was straight anyhow, he thought, taking the
pen. He'd watch that old Rannie didn't try any monkey tricks. Very
decent of him. He signed. He took the money in large, blue and purple
denominations, crisp, crackling, delicious.
"And you don't forget," said Mr. Dainopoulos, turning towards the safe
again. "By and by I'll have some more business, big business, and you'll
get a big piece o' money if you work in with me. When you come back, eh?
Out here, plenty business but nobody honest, to manage." He paused,
looking down at the floor, hampered by his deficient English to explain
what he meant. He was rather moved, too, because he saw, right there in
his own continuing city, opportunities for business undreamed of by the
tall blond officers in their shining brown harness down at headquarters.
He saw buildings going up which would be sold for a song, a floating
dock which might be acquired for a purely nominal sum when the war was
over. He saw jetties and rolling-stock and launches which would be sold
at hurried auctions for knock-down prices, a score at a time. But one
must have somebody one can trust, a partner or a manager. Mr.
Dainopoulos wanted no partners. His temperament was to feel his way
along alone, making sudden rushes at his objective or sitting down to
wait. A partner was of no use to him. But he figured that someone like
Mr. Spokesly would be of great assistance in his business as he planned
it later.
He put his cash-box away, slammed his safe shut, and began to open his
shop for his ostensible business of money-changing.
"Now you get out to the ship as soon as you got your gear," he said,
"and that young feller'll go with you in the boat."
Mr. Spokesly was startled to see how close the _Kalkis_ was in shore,
opposite the house. Without a glass he could see the balcony and the
window within which Mrs. Dainopoulos lay watching the sunlight on the
sea. As he came nearer to the ship, however, sitting in the row boat
with the trembling young Hebrew beside him, he became preoccupied with
her lines. And indeed to a seafaring man the _Kalkis_ was a problem. She
resembled nothing so much as the broken-down blood animal whom one
discovers hauling a cab. Mr. Spokesly could see she had been a yacht.
Her once tall masts were cut to stumps and a smooth-rivetted funnel at
the same graceful rake was full of degrading dinges. A singularly
shapely hull carried amidships a grotesque abortion in the form of a
super-imposed upper bridge, and the teak deck forward was broken by a
square hatchway. All the scuttles along her sides, once gleaming brass
and crystal, were blind with dead-lights and painted over. Another hatch
had been made where the owner's skylight had been and a friction-winch
screamed and scuttered on the once spotless poop. As Mr. Spokesly once
phrased it later, it was like meeting some girl, whose family you knew,
on the streets. A lighter lay alongside loaded with sacks and cases, and
the friction-winch shrieked and jerked the sling into the air as a gang
of frowzy Greeks hooked them on.
They came round her bows to reach the gangway and Mr. Spokesly gave way
to a feeling of bitterness for a moment as he looked up at the gracile
sprit stem from which some utilitarian had sawed the bowsprit and
carefully tacked over the stump a battered piece of sheet-copper. It
affected him like the mutilation of a beautiful human body. What tales
she could tell! Now he saw the mark of her original name showing up in
rows of puttied screw-holes on the flare of the bow. _Carmencita._ She
must have been a saucy little craft, her snowy gangway picked out with
white ropes and polished brass stanchions. And now only a dirty ladder
hung there.
Leaving the little Jew to get up as best he could, Mr. Spokesly climbed
on deck and strode forward. He was curious to see what sort of mate it
could be who came into port with a ship like this. His professional
pride was nauseated. He kicked a bucket half full of potato peelings out
of the doorway and entered the deck-house.
Garlic, stale wine, and cold suet were combined with a more sinister
perfume that Mr. Spokesly knew was rats. He looked around upon a scene
which made him wonder. It made him think of some forecastles he had
lived in when he was a seaman, forecastles on Sunday morning after a
Saturday night ashore on the Barbary Coast or in Newcastle, New South
Wales. It was the saloon, apparently, and the breakfast had not been
cleared away. A large yellow cat was gnawing at a slab of fish he had
dragged from the table, bringing most of the cloth, with the cruet,
after him. On the settee behind the table lay a man in trousers and
singlet, snoring. He was wearing red silk socks full of holes, and a fly
crawled along his full red lips below a large black moustache. In a
pantry on one side a young man with a black moustache and in a blue
apron, spotted with food, was smoking a cigarette and wiping some dishes
with an almost incredibly dirty cloth.
"Where's the cap'en?" demanded Mr. Spokesly in a voice so harsh and
aggressive he hardly recognized it himself. The young man came out
wiping his hands on his hips and shrugging his shoulders.
"Where's the mate?"
The young man pointed at the figure on the settee. Mr. Spokesly went
round the table and gave the recumbent gentleman a shake. Uttering a
choking snort, the late chief officer opened his eyes, sat up, and
looked round in a way that proved conclusively he had no clear notion of
his locality. Eventually he discovered that the shakings came from a
total stranger and he focussed a full stare from his black eyes upon Mr.
Spokesly.
"I'm the new mate," said the latter. "Where's my cabin?"
"Ai!" said the other, staring, both hands on the dirty table-cloth. "Ai!
You gotta nerve. What you doin' here, eh?"
"All right," said Mr. Spokesly, "I'll see to you in a minute. Here, you!
Where's the mate's cabin, savvy? Room, cabin, bunk."
The young man, wiping his hands again on his hips, went over to an
opening which led down a stairway and beckoned. Mr. Spokesly followed.
What he found was very much of a piece with the saloon. One side of the
ship was occupied by a large room marked "Captain." On the other side
were two cabins, the forward one of which he was given to understand was
his. To call it a pigsty would not convey any conception of the dire
disorder of it. The delicate hardwood panelling of the yacht had been
painted over with a thick layer of greenish-white paint; and this was
coated, at each end of the bunk, with a black deposit of human origin
where the oiled head and neglected feet of the late incumbent had
rubbed. The walnut table was marked with circles where hot cups had been
set down, and the edges were charred by cigarette-ends left to burn. The
basin was cracked and half full of black water. Mr. Spokesly gave one
glance at the toilet shelf and then turned away hastily to the young
man, who was watching him in some curiosity.
"You speak English?" he was asked curtly.
"Oh yass, I spick Ingleesh. Plenty Ingleesh."
"Right. Get this place clean. You savvy? Clean all out. Quick, presto.
Savvy?"
"Yass, I savvy."
"Go on then."
"I finish saloon...."
"You let the saloon alone. Clean this place out _now_."
There was a footfall on the staircase and the late chief officer, Cæsare
Spiteri by name, came slowly down, holding by the hand-rail fixed over
the door of the alleyway. There was a dull smoulder in his large
bloodshot black eyes which seemed to bode trouble. He came forward,
elaborately oblivious of Mr. Spokesly, his shoulders hunched, his large
hand caressing his moustache. He spoke rapidly in Greek to the nervous
steward, who began to edge away.
"Hi!" called Mr. Spokesly. "Do what I tell you. See here," he added to
Mr. Spiteri, "you finished last night, I understand. You get your gear
out of this and get away ashore."
"Yah! Who are you?" snarled Mr. Spiteri in a quiet tone which made the
steward more nervous than ever.
"I'm mate of this ship, and if you don't get out in five minutes...."
He had no chance to finish. Mr. Spiteri made a circular sweep with one
of his stockinged feet, which knocked Mr. Spokesly off his own, and he
fell backwards on the settee. The effect upon him was surprising.
Reflecting upon it later, when he got away to sea, Mr. Spokesly was
surprised at himself. He certainly saw red. The filthy condition of the
ship, the degradation of the yacht _Carmencita_ to the baseness of the
_Kalkis_, and his own spiritual exaltation, reacted to fill him with an
extraordinary vitality of anger. Mr. Spiteri was not in the pink of
condition either. He had been drinking heavily the previous evening and
his head ached. He went down at the first tremendous impact of Mr.
Spokesly's fleshy and muscular body, and Mr. Spokesly came down on top
of him. He immediately sank his large white teeth in Mr. Spokesly's left
hand. Mr. Spokesly grunted. "Leggo, you bastard, leggo!" And at short
range mashed the Spiteri ear, neck, and jaw hard and fast. Mr. Spiteri
let go, but his antagonist was oblivious until he saw the man's face
whiten and sag loosely under his blows, while from his own head, where
the plaster had come off in the struggle, blood began to drip over them
both.
Mr. Spokesly got up, breathing hard, and pointed into the room.
"Get busy," he said to the steward, "and clean all up. Shift this out of
the way," and he touched the redoubtable Spiteri with his foot. Quite
unwittingly, for he had been in a passion for the moment, Mr. Spokesly
had struck hard on one of the vital places of a man's body, just behind
the ear, and Mr. Spiteri, for the first time in his life, had fainted.
Out on deck, the new mate realized what he had let himself in for, and
clicked his tongue as he thought, a trick he had never been able to
abandon since he had left school. Tck! Tck! He saw his young Jew friend
making expressive motions with his hands to the boatman who was waiting
for his money. Mr. Spokesly had an idea. He whistled to the boatman.
"You wait," he called and held up his hand. Then he beckoned to the
youth.
"What's your name?" he demanded. The youth laid his hand on his breast
and made a deep obeisance.
"Yes, yes!" shouted the exasperated chief officer. "What's your name?
Moses, Isaac, Abraham, eh? Never mind, come on." He led the way into the
saloon and waved his hands. The cat rushed out of the door, followed by
a kick.
"Now you clean up, understand?"
To his unalloyed delight the youth did understand. The latter's nervous
prostration had been due chiefly to the fact that he was entirely
ignorant of what was expected of him. He took off his deplorable coat
and grasped a bucket.
Mr. Spokesly went downstairs again.
Mr. Spiteri was resting on one elbow watching the steward take his
simple personal effects from the drawers under the bunk and stow them in
an old suitcase.
"Get up on deck," ordered Mr. Spokesly. "I wouldn't have a swab like you
in the forecastle. Don't wonder the Old Man complained."
Mr. Spiteri rose half way, coughed and spat, rose to his feet, and
wavered uncertainly towards the stairs.
"Come on, stuff 'em in! That'll do. Now take it up and pitch it into the
boat."
The steward hurried up with the bulging and half-closed suitcase and Mr.
Spokesly followed with his predecessor's boots.
"Down you go," he said, dropping the boots into the boat and following
them up with the suitcase. "That's it," as he saw Mr. Spiteri step from
the ladder and topple against the thwarts. "Now we'll see who's in
charge of this ship."
He walked to the bridge-rail, put two fingers in his mouth and blew a
shrill blast. Presently out of the little forecastle emerged a stout man
in a canvas apron and sporting a large well-nourished moustache. Mr.
Spokesly's heart sank.
"Come here!" he shouted, beckoning.
"What's the matter, Mister?" said the aproned one, climbing up the
abominable ladder with its stairs of iron rods. Mr. Spokesly's heart
rose again.
"You English?" he asked.
"Sure, I'm a French Canadian," retorted the other. "What's the matter?
Are you the new mate?"
"Yes," said Mr. Spokesly. "I'm the new mate. Are you the bosun?"
"Sure I am," said the other indignantly. "What did you think I was? The
cook?"
"Now, now, cut it out," warned the new mate. "I've had all I can stand
just for the present. How many men have you got?"
"Three. How many did you think I got? Thirty?"
"Bosun, if you want it, you can have it, but I tell you straight you got
to help me get this ship clean."
"Sure I will. What did you think I was doin'?"
"Send a man along with a bucket of soft soap and water," said Mr.
Spokesly hastily. "I'll go round with you later."
"Where's that other mate?" asked the bosun, rather mystified.
"Over the side," said Mr. Spokesly, pointing.
"You seen the captinne yet?" the bosun pursued.
"Plenty, plenty. Send a man along."
Mr. Spokesly turned and to his intense astonishment found Captain Rannie
in the saloon.
"Why, where were you all the time?" he asked.
"In my cabin," said Captain Rannie, staring at the floor nervously. "I
must say you make noise enough when you join a ship."
"Well, Captain, I'll argue all you want later. Where's the medicine
chest?"
"In my cabin."
"Then you'll have to give me the run of it to stop this bleeding. Got
any friars' balsam?"
"I--I--I'll see. I'll see." Captain Rannie objected to be approached
directly. He was already beginning to wonder, after listening to the
very emphatic remarks of his new chief officer through the bulkhead of
his cabin, if he had not made a mistake in demanding a change. Very
unsettling, a change. He went downstairs again and unlocked his door. It
had three locks, Mr. Spokesly observed in some surprise. After opening
the door, Captain Rannie stepped through and quickly drew a heavy blue
curtain across.
"I'll bring it out to you," he said from within.
Mr. Spokesly dragged the curtain back and stepped in himself. He was
indignant at this extraordinary treatment. He was astounded, however, to
see Captain Rannie shrink away towards the settee, holding up his arms.
"Don't you dare to touch me!" he shrieked in a very low key. "Don't
you...."
Mr. Spokesly suddenly caught sight of himself in the glass across the
room. He was not a very reassuring spectacle. His face was dirty and
blood-smeared, and his collar was torn away from his throat. He closed
the door.
"Captain," he said, "we'd better have an understanding right at the
start. I'm going to be mate o' this ship for six months."
"You think you are," whispered the captain, slowly approaching a cabinet
on the wall. "You only think you are."
"Well, I been paid for it anyway," said Mr. Spokesly, examining his
wounded hand. "So we'll take it for granted. Now if you back me up, I'll
back you up. Why didn't you come out and help me when that stiff started
to make trouble?"
Captain Rannie absolutely ignored this question. He was in a corner, and
like some animals in similar plight, he might almost be said to have
feigned death. He stood stock still looking into his medicine chest, his
back to Mr. Spokesly, his high shoulders raised higher. He was in a
corner, for he had been betrayed already into the demonstration of
nervous fear. It was the knowledge of his horror of the slightest
physical contact with others that Mr. Spiteri had been unable to resist.
"He's nearly bit my thumb through," went on Mr. Spokesly, walking over
to the wash-bowl. The ship shook as the winch hurled the slings into the
air. Down below a worn pump was knocking its heart out in a succession
of hacking coughs.
Captain Rannie, the flask of friars' balsam in his hand, turned slowly
from the cabinet and moved cautiously to the table. He set it down, went
back, and drew out a roll of bandage. He was beginning to recover his
normal state of mind. Everything so far had taken the form in his view
of violating the privacy of the commander. Everything! Here was this
man, not five minutes on the ship, actually forcing his way into the
captain's room. Captain Rannie had never heard of such a thing in his
life. It loomed before him with the grimness of an irrevocable disaster.
He had always had that last resource in his encounters with Spiteri--he
could go into his room, lock all three locks, draw the heavy blue
curtain, and remain in a mysterious seclusion for as long as he liked.
Now--he almost shuddered with anguish--here was this new chief
officer--a perfect stranger--didn't know him from Adam--washing his
wounds absolutely in the sacred wash-bowl, standing in not over clean
shoes on the very piece of matting on which he himself, the master of
the vessel, stood while shaving and making stern faces at himself in the
glass as he rehearsed imaginary scenes with the rabble outside. In a few
moments Mr. Spokesly's eyes, grown accustomed to the sombre twilight of
the blue curtains of the scuttles, would be wandering round the cabin,
noting things Captain Rannie showed to no one. No one. He grew fierce as
he thought of his outraged privacy. He must get this man out of the room
quickly. He slopped friars' balsam on some cotton wool, and fixing his
pale, exasperated gaze upon Mr. Spokesly's thumb, began to bind it up.
Mr. Spokesly felt an urgent need for a smoke. He reached out and drew a
cigarette from a box on the table and Captain Rannie's head bent lower
as he flushed with a renewed sense of outrage. Nothing sacred! Without
the slightest hint of a request.
"We may have a passenger, I hear," said the oblivious Mr. Spokesly as he
managed to get the cigarette alight.
"Oh, dear me, no!" retorted Captain Rannie, with a sort of despairing
chuckle. "Quite impossible, quite. I shouldn't dream of allowing
anything of the sort."
"Not if the boss wanted it?"
"Oh, no doubt, in that case, the master of the vessel would be the last
to hear of it." He returned to the cabinet to cut some plaster. Captain
Rannie had not a bedside manner. His method of affixing the plaster made
his patient grunt. Gazing over the upraised arm of the captain, Mr.
Spokesly suddenly fixed his eyes with attention on the pictures round
the bunk. They were pictures of people who were, so to say, the
antithesis of his new commander, pugilists and wrestlers and dancers,
men and women of exaggerated physical development. Some of them were so
stark in their emphasis on the muscles that they resembled anatomical
diagrams. There were photographs, too, of sculptures--sharp, white, and
beautiful against black velvet backgrounds; boys wrestling, girls
dancing, a naked youth striving with a leopard. And on a hook near the
door was a set of those elastic cords and pulleys whereby athletic
prowess is developed. Mr. Spokesly suddenly lost his belligerent mood.
He had encountered something he did not quite understand. He turned as
the captain finished and his eye fell on shelves packed with books. And
outside the winch groaned and squeaked, down below the pump thumped and
bucketed.
"I'll go," said Mr. Spokesly. "I must find the bosun...." And he went
out, eager to go at the job and get rid of this dreadful grime on the
unhappy old ship. As he went the captain stood in front of the medicine
chest swallowing something, a dull red flush on his peaked and wrinkled
face. Suddenly he darted to the door and slammed it, locking it and
hurling the curtain across. And then he sat down in a wicker chair and
covered his eyes with his hand. He was trembling violently.
For he was a man who was at war with the world. He was so preoccupied
with this tremendous conflict that the disturbance in Europe scarcely
sounded in his ears. He was a man without faith and without desire of
hope. In the years behind him lay the wreckage of honour, when he had
gone out east to the China Coast and never gone back. Revenge, he had
called it, and called it still, for unascertained and undefined
injuries. Since then he had had freedom. He had hugged the thought of
the woman, who had imagined herself so clever at blinding him, working
in poverty to keep herself and her brat. Her brat, ha--ha! Away out
there in China, a thousand miles up an immense river, in the home
river-port of his country ship, he said ha--ha! and fell to improving
himself. Driven to devise a mode of existence both unsocial and
unintellectual, he had stumbled upon strange things in human life. He
accumulated vast stocks of scandal about humanity, and delved into
repositories of knowledge which most men avoid and forget. Those and the
pipe, which led him into another life altogether, the life of
irresponsible dreams, wherein a man's mind, released from the body yet
retaining the desires of the body, ranges forth into twilights of
oblivion, clutching here and there at strange seductive shapes and
thrilling to voices not heard before. Captain Rannie, out there, was
much happier than many men who hold their souls in leash and render
their accounts exactly. He sailed up and down his great river, a mystery
to the Chinamen of the crew, a joke among the Europeans. It did not
become apparent to him or anybody else that anything was happening to
him. Nothing was happening to him save that the lacquer and varnish and
ornament of his conventional upbringing in England were nearly all gone,
and underneath there was nothing save himself, a timid, sensitive,
sensual, quarrelsome creature with a disposition that seemed to rational
people to have gone rancid with the heat. They bore with him because he
was used to the work, and he was a warm man in silver dollars, too, they
said. But the country-ships began to go home. The colossal freights out
of England could not be resisted. Captain Rannie was ordered to take his
ship home. Home! He funked horribly but he funked losing his job still
more, and he took her home as far as Port Said, with a cargo of tobacco
from Sumatra. But farther he would not go. He made himself ill, an easy
trick with a well-stocked medicine chest, and no one suspected a man
would be striving to avoid reaching England. It was generally just the
other way round. He went to the hospital until the ship was gone and
then became convalescent, moping about Port Said in his yellow pongee
suits and enormous panama hat, smoking innumerable cigarettes and
discovering among other things a new world of gigantic phantoms.
It was not difficult, he found, to discover the dealers in drugs and he
set out, as a buyer of tobacco. But although his first trip to Saloniki
and back to Alexandria was successful and enormously profitable, he
became aware that he was being uncomfortably shadowed, and he left again
in an Italian steamer. It was here he encountered Mr. Dainopoulos, bound
home from a business trip to Egypt; where he had been buying up cheap
the stocks of ship-chandlers who had been caught by the sudden
withdrawal of troops from the Dardanelles for service in the north. Mr.
Dainopoulos had bought a small ship and now needed a commander.
So far, one might say, Captain Rannie had simply lived the life of many
of his condition, Englishmen who had grown soft and flaccid during their
long exiles and who now crept furtively along in the shadow of war,
neither very honest nor very crooked, ignoble and negligible. But as he
sat there now behind his locked door and heavy curtain, shading his eyes
with his hand, he faced the immediate future with dread. The sight of
Mr. Spokesly, bandaged and plastered, hurrying out to get on with the
work, made him see with painful clearness where he himself had fallen
and how problematic was the task ahead. He would not tackle a job like
this again, he told himself. Never again. He would get away out East
again with what he had already made and resume the old, safe, easy
river-life, receiving his stacks of "reading matter" from London,
reading until his brain was soft and soggy with foolish dreams. It was
the best life he knew and he longed to get back to it. After this
voyage. How he hated all this! When he came back into the world of
urgent men after one of his long periods of stupor, he was horrified at
the necessity of living at all, and sometimes contemplated suicide. Now
he was afraid, not so much of any punishment which might befall him as
of the destruction of his way of life, the harsh secular interferences,
the spying out of his useless secrets and his long-hid dishonour. It was
his very life now, this carefully contrived oblivion in which he lay
like an insect in a cocoon. It was beyond his power to desire a return
to England. The very thought made him tremble. One of the secrets he
guarded with such hysterical care was his loathing of women. Men thought
him a rake, _a viveur--ha-ha_! That was what he wanted them to think. He
could not bear any intimacy at all. This new chief officer--that was the
disturbing element in his reverie--must be given to understand there
could be no intimacy, none whatever.
He listened to the sounds of scrubbing outside, vigorous thumps and
kicks as the mops went to and fro. There were voices, too, the ingenuous
bawlings of that bosun, offensively active. An unwarrantable intrusion!
Quite unnecessary, all this waste of soap and soda. Captain Rannie began
to revive: the white tabloid he had swallowed as the door closed behind
Mr. Spokesly was getting its work in. He felt better. He would go ashore
and explain to Mr. Dainopoulos that this sort of thing could not go on.
He examined himself in the glass with stern attention. His gray hair,
parted just off the middle, was touched with a brush. Good. He was
ready. He lit a cigarette. He unlocked the door and went out.
Up on deck Captain Rannie was immediately aware of a novel state of
affairs. It was so long since he had experienced the sensation he could
scarcely identify it. There was someone in charge. The old
accommodation-ladder, untouched since the time of Spiteri's advent, was
down and the teak steps hastily scrubbed. Made fast to the grating was
his boat, washed and with a red and yellow flag on the stern-seat. Mr.
Spokesly in a pair of the bosun's rubber boots and with his coat off,
came up, blowing a whistle. A young Norwegian came clattering up the
ladder from the fore-deck.
"Go and wash your face," said Mr. Spokesly. "And take the cap'en
ashore."
Captain Rannie, as he sat with the tiller in his hand and watched the
young Norwegian pulling with all his might, felt extraordinarily proud.
That was the way to handle these people. He had been right after all. Be
firm. New blood, a tight hand. Some respect now for the master of the
vessel. And no intimacy. "Take the captain ashore." Brief, curt,
attentive. That, he held, was the thing. To dwell apart, within a
shining envelope of secular discipline, unquestioned, unhampered, and
unloved--that in Captain Rannie's mind was the priceless privilege of
command.