CHAPTER XVI

Years afterwards, when Mr. Spokesly, a cool and established person in

authority in a far distant territory, would turn his thoughts back

occasionally to the great period of his life, he would wonder how long

it might have lasted had he not gone into the city that calm evening,

had he never met that gay and irrepressible young man. There was no

bitterness in his reflections. He saw, in that future time, how far

removed from the firm shores of reality he and Evanthia were floating,

his romantic exaltation supporting them both while she watched him with

a suspicion of amazement in her eyes.

For there was a point in that period in the white stone house on the

mountain side, high above the village in the quiet valley, when Evanthia

herself wondered what was going to happen. She trembled for a while upon

the verge of acceptance and surrender. They would go, she submitting to

his command, and take that chance together which he was for ever

picturing in his mind as a rush for freedom and ultimate happiness.

Almost she lost that poise of spirit which enabled her to mystify and

subjugate him. Almost she succumbed to the genius and beauty of the

place, to the intensity of his emotions and the romantic possibilities

of the future he desired to evoke. For one brief moment, so swiftly

obliterated that he was hardly aware of it before it was gone, she saw

herself united to him, thinking his thoughts, breathing his hopes,

facing with her own high courage the terrors of life in an unknown land,

for ever. He remembered it (and so did she) for many years, that one

ineffable flash of supreme happiness when their spirits joined.

They had been down the steep hillside and across the Cordelio road to

the shore where there stood a blue bath house built out over the water.

As they had scrambled and slid among the shingle and loose boulders, the

upper reaches of the mountains touched to glowing bronze by the setting

sun while they were in a kind of golden twilight, there came a call from

the next house and they saw a white figure at the heavy iron gate in the

garden wall. And by the time they were among the houses of the village

and stared at by the shy, silent housewives who were gathered about the

great stone troughs of the wash house, they were joined by Esther,

Evanthia's friend. And together the three of them, with towels and

bathing suits, went down to the blue bath-house as the sparse lights of

the city began to sparkle across the water.

Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She traversed every one of his preconceived

notions of a Jewess and of a Russian, yet she was both. She had come

down from Pera with her Armenian husband, a tall, thin, dark man with a

resounding and cavernous nose, who held a position in what he called the

Public Debt. He had come over with her one evening and paid an extremely

formal call, presenting his card, which bore the words "Public Debt" in

one corner below his polysyllabic name. Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She

was a vigorous, well-knit woman of thirty, with an animated

good-humoured face and capable limbs. He liked her broken English, which

was uttered in a hoarse sensible voice. He liked her because she was a

strong advocate of his. He heard her muttering away to Evanthia in a

husky undertone and he was perfectly well aware that she was taking his

part and proving to Evanthia that she would be a fool if she did not

stay by him. She would talk to him alone, too, and repeat what she had

said.

"You take her away," she urged. "Soon as you can. Me and my 'usban', we

go to Buenos Aires soon as we can. This place no good."

"I want her to," he said. "She says yes, too."

"She say yes? She say anything. She like to fool you. I know. I tell

her--you stay wis your 'usban'. Englishmen good 'usban's, eh?"

"Esther, tell me something. You think, when I say, Come, she'll come

with me? You think so?"

For an instant Esther's firmly modelled and sensible features assumed an

expression inexplicable to the serious man watching them. For an instant

she was on the verge of telling him the truth. But Esther was

empirically aware of the importance of moods in the development of

truth; and she said with great heartiness: "I am tellin' you, yes! She

come. I make her! But how you get away from here? You gotta wait till

the war finish. And where go? Germany?"

"What for?" he had demanded with tremendous astonishment.

Esther looked at him then with some curiosity. She had all the news from

Constantinople, and in the light of that news it seemed incredible to

her that any one should doubt the triumph of the Central Powers. There

would be nowhere else to go, in her opinion, unless one fled to America.

"Home, of course," he had said, and of a sudden had experienced an

almost physical sickness of longing for the humid foggy land in the

Northern Sea, the land of dark green headlands showing chalk-white

below, of hedges like thick black ropes on the landscape, with sunken

roads between, of little towns of gray and black stone with the dark red

roofs and stumpy spires against the sky of clouds like heaps of

comfortable cushions. He had been amazed at her cool suggestion that

they go to Germany, and she had been amazed at him. For she had all the

news from Constantinople, news that told her that the British fleets

were at the bottom of the sea, that the millions in England were

starving, the King fled to America, and that the great Kaiser in his

palace in Berlin was setting out on his triumphal march to London to be

crowned Czar of Europe. And why then should he not go to Germany? That

was what she would do. She looked at him curiously as he said "Home!"

not understanding, of course, the meaning of the word. She had a house,

but the subtle implications of the word home, the word saturated with a

thousand years of local traditions and sympathies, the word that is the

invisible centre of our world, she did not comprehend. For her,

patriotism was a dim and unfamiliar perplexity. She had no abstract

ideas at all. She could not read very well. She personified the things

in her heart. To her they were men as real as her husband and Mr.

Spokesly himself. Husband, house, money, sun, moon, sea, and earth--on

these concrete manifestations of existence she based an uncurious

philosophy. And it must be understood that love was very much the same.

Esther had none of Evanthia's untutored theatricality. She never saw

herself as the Queen of Sheba or the mistress of a King. She had had a

pretty hard life of it in Odessa as a child, and when she was fifteen

she began to divide men into two main classes, the generous and the

stingy. It never entered her head she could live without being dependent

upon men. And then she made a fresh discovery, that generous men were

often foolish and spent their money on women who were monsters of

infidelity. Esther was faithful. Even when she was left with a baby and

no money, when she was under no obligation to treat men with

consideration, she remained one of those who keep their word out of an

allegiance to some obscure instinct for probity. And now she was married

to her Armenian, a serious creature with vague longings after Western

ideas or what he imagined were Western ideas. She was conscious of both

love and happiness as tangible facets of her existence. She had hold of

them, and in her strong capable hands she turned them to good account.

She liked Evanthia because she had that ineluctable quality of

transfiguring an act into a grandiose gesture. When Esther's little boy

came on Sunday to visit his mother, it was Evanthia who swooped upon

him, crushed him to her bosom with an exquisitely dramatic gesture of

motherhood, stroked his sleek dark head and smooth little face, and

forgot all about him an hour later. Esther never did that. When she

looked at her son she seemed to see through the past into the future.

Her kind capable face was grave and abstracted as she watched him. She

seemed to be apprehensive of their security. Her husband did not dislike

the child. But if they could only get to Buenos Aires!

She came with them now and soon they were in the water racing to the end

of the jetty and diving into the flickering green transparency towards

the white sand bottom. He watched the two of them sometimes, while he

sat on the jetty and they tried to pull each other under, noting the

differences of their characters and bodies. Esther was something beyond

his past experience. She had the sturdy muscular form of a strong youth

and the husky voice of a man. As she climbed up towards him, the water

glistening on the smooth sinewy arms and legs, and as she shook the

drops from her eyes with a boyish energy and seating herself beside him

accepted a cigarette, he was conscious of that delicious sensuous

emotion with which a man regards the friend of his beloved without

invalidating for a moment his own authentic fidelity. His love for one

woman reveals to him the essential beauty of all women. And it was

characteristic of Evanthia to swim back to the bath-house steps and go

in to dress, leaving them there to talk for a moment.

"Say, Esther, where does your husband go every night? Why don't he come

home and eat early?"

"He go to some club," she said, blowing a jet of smoke upwards. "He very

fond of his club. He read plenty book, my 'usban'."

"What sort of books?"

"I don' know. Politics, Science, Philosophy. You go to that club, too.

Your friend the Englishman, him with Armenian wife, he go there."

"I know he does. I was thinkin' about it. But it's a long way out here

at night."

Esther laughed, a low husky chuckle, as she rose, flung away the

cigarette and ran back to the bath house.

"Oh-ho! You love Evanthia too much!" she flung over her firm vigorous

shoulder.

He knew by now that she meant "very much"; and as he followed her he

agreed she was right. He had reached that stage when the past and the

future were both obliterated by the intense vitality of existence. Only

the never-ending desire to get her away into his own environment, to see

her against a familiar background, held him to the plan he had worked

out to get away. And it was the source of much of his irony in later,

more prosperous years that he had come to see how essentially egotism

and male vanity that never-ending desire happened to be. He saw the

sharp cleavage, as one sees a fault in a range of cliffs at a distance,

between his love and his pride. He saw that the fear in his heart was

for himself all the time, lest he should not come out of the adventure

with his pride entire.

But that evening he was absorbed in his emotions, saturated with the

rich and coloured shadows of the valley, the tremendous loom of the

mountains and the vast obscurity of the sea. And as they crossed the

road he put his hand on her shoulder while Esther moved on ahead in the

dusk to prepare the evening meal. And they stood for a moment in the

road, facing the huge lift of the earth towards the great golden stars,

silent in the oncoming darkness. They heard the deep booming bark of a

watch-dog far up the valley, a sound like the clang of metal plates on

earthen floors. She looked at him with a characteristic quick turn of

the head, her body poised as though for flight.

"Promise you will come," he said thickly, holding to her tightly as

though she were the stronger. "Can't you understand? I _must_ go, and I

can't go without you, leave you here. Promise!"

She watched him steadily as he said this, her eyes bright in the dusk

and charged with that enigmatic expression of waiting and of knowledge

beyond his imagining. It almost took her breath away at times, this

consciousness of events of which he knew nothing. He wanted her to go

with him to that terrible distant land where already the multitudes,

starved out by the victorious Germans, were devouring their own

children, even carrying their dead back in ships.... And he did not

know.

"Promise!" he muttered, straining her to him. She looked up the dim

dusty road, along which weary hearts had wandered for so many centuries,

and a sudden wave of pity for him swept over her. She saw him for a

moment as a pathetic and solitary being trembling upon the brink of a

tragic destiny, a being who had come up out of the sea to do her bidding

and who would sail out again into the chaos of tempests and war, and

vanish. And it was her sudden perception of this dramatic quality in

their relations that brought about the brief passionate tenderness. It

was her way, to give men at the very last a perfect memory of her, to

carry away with them into the shadows.

"Yes," she said gently, and her strong and vigorous body relaxed against

his as he held her close. "How could you leave me here, alone? _Mon

Dieu!_ We will go!"

And for a moment she meant it. She meant to go. She saw herself, not in

England it is true, but as the central figure in a gorgeous pageant of

fidelity, a tragic queen following a beggar man into captivity in a

strange land of her own bizarre imagining. They stood in the road for a

while, he staring at the stars rising over the dark summits and she

looking up the road into the dusk at a mysterious drama playing away in

the brightness of the future. And then the moment was past, and neither

of them comprehended just then how far their thoughts had gone asunder.

And she was sincere in that exclamation, when she asked how he could

leave her there alone? For she was alone. The young Jew trotted to and

from the town bearing fragments of news, like a faithful dog carrying

things in his mouth, but he had given her nothing as yet that

constituted certainty. She trembled within the circle of the arm that

held her as she suddenly saw herself--alone. She must keep him there yet

a little longer. And as they climbed up the gully and reached the iron

gate in the garden wall, the tears started to her eyes. He saw them in

the light of the lamp in the kitchen and kissed her with a fresh access

of emotion. He did not imagine the cause of them. She stared at him

through their brightness and smiled, her bosom heaving. She knew he

would never never realize they were tears of anger, and were evoked by

the perception of the helplessness of women in a world of predatory men.

But above and beyond this terrible abstract indignation she found

herself regarding him at intervals with smouldering eyes because of a

certain subtle complacency in his manner. She could not know that this

was the habit of years, or that men of his race are invariably

complacent in the presence of their women. She could not conceive him in

any rôle in which he had the right to be complacent. Yet he combined it

with a tender humility that was very sweet to her in her situation out

there on the hillside, playing for a hazardous stake. It was then she

would look at him in stupefaction, wondering if she were going mad, and

she afterwards would take the young Jew by the hair, dragging his head

this way and that, and mutter between her clenched teeth: "_Mon Dieu! Je

déteste les hommes!_" And he, poor youth, would assume an expression of

pallid horror, for he had no idea what she was talking about, and

imagined he had failed to carry out some of her imperious commands.

"Oh, Madama, what has thy servant done to deserve this?" he would

whimper, less certain than ever of the solidity of his fortunes. And she

would look at him, her hand dropping to her side as she gave a little

laugh.

"Did I hurt you?" she would chuckle, and he would explain that she had

not.

"But when Madama speaks in that strange tongue her servant is afraid he

has not done his errand in the town as she desires."

"Tck! Go every day. You will find him soon."

"If Madama gave me a letter...."

"And some great fool of an Osmanli soldier would go through thy pockets,

and lock thee up in the jail on Mount Pagos with all the other Jews. And

who would write the letter? You? Can you write?"

"Very little, Madama," he muttered, trembling.

"And I cannot write at all, though I don't tell anybody. I could never

learn. I read, yes; the large words in the cinemas; but not letters. Let

us forget that. You have the picture?"

"Ah, Madama, it is next my heart!"

He would bring it out, unfolding a fragment of paper, and show her a

photograph about as large as a stamp, and she would glower at it for a

moment.

"You are sure he is not at the Hotel Kraemer?"

"Madama, one of the maids there is of my own people, the Eskenazi, and

she has assured me there is no one like the picture there. But the

general will arrive in a day or two. Perhaps he is a general, Madama?"

he hinted.

"He? Not even a little one! Ha--ha!" she chuckled again. "The dear fool!

But hear me. He may be with the general. He may be what they call an

_aide_. He may...." She broke off, staring hard at the youth, suddenly

remembering that he might not come at all. "Go!" she ordered absently,

"find him and thy fortune is made."

But the idea of a letter was attractively novel to her, and she

immediately saw herself inspiring the dear fool with some of her own

grandiose ideas. She even thought of sounding Esther upon the likelihood

of her husband writing a letter. She stood by the window looking down

into the garden where Mr. Spokesly sat smoking and gazing at the blue

bowl of the gulf and the distant gray-green olive groves beyond the

city. She was deliberating upon the significance of her courier's latest

breathless news from the kitchen of the Hotel Kraemer. The general was

arriving from the south. He and his staff had been as far as Jerusalem

after the great victory over the British and were due to-morrow in the

city on their way back to Constantinople. Evanthia's courage had

suffered from the contradictory nature of her earlier news. It was part

of her life to sift and analyze the words that ran through city and

country from mouth to mouth. She had never had any real confidence in

any other form of information. If she hired any one to write a letter,

her words vanished into incomprehensible hieroglyphics and she had no

guarantee the man did not lie. And when Amos had told her on the ship

what he had heard in the Rue Voulgaróktono that they had reached Aidin,

she had jumped to the conclusion that Lietherthal was with a party on

their way from Constantinople to Smyrna. And now her quick brain saw the

reason why they had not arrived before. He had joined the staff of the

general and had gone away south, through Kara-hissar, to Adana and

Aleppo to Damascus. And now they were on their way back. She looked down

into the garden, where Mr. Spokesly, quietly smoking, was reflecting

upon the mystery of a woman's desires. Here, after all, she had

forgotten all about that other fellow, who was probably having a good

time in Athens and who had no doubt forgotten about her. And she was

alone here, utterly dependent upon him, who had made his plans for

taking her away to a civilized country, where he could make her happy.

He smiled with profound satisfaction as he thought of himself with her

beside him, in London. How her beauty would flash like a barbaric jewel

in that gray old city! He remembered the money she had stowed away,

ready for the great adventure. He called it that in romantic moments,

yet what was more easy than running out after dark, with nothing fast

enough to catch him? Especially as he heard that there would be a review

in a day or so when everyone would be on their toes to see the general.

He thought of the money because even in his romantic moments there was

enough to live on for a year "while he looked round." No more

second-mate's jobs, he muttered. He would pick and choose. He rose and

stretched luxuriously, noting the calm glitter of the city's lights like

a necklace on the bosom of the mountain. He would have to spend an

evening with that chap Marsh. Very decent fellow. Had pressed him more

than once to join them at Costi's in the Rue Parallel. He was satisfied

apparently, married to his Armenian wife and teaching music and

languages to earn a living for a large family. Mr. Spokesly recalled a

remark made by Mr. Marsh one day at the Sports Club: "Oh! Don't

misunderstand me! For myself, as regards the war, you know, I am a

philosopher. What can we do? Ask any fair-minded person at home, what

could they do, in our position? There's only one answer--make the best

of it. Don't misunderstand us."

And he had ventured a remark that possibly they, and the fair-minded

person at home, might misunderstand him, coming into an enemy port like

that.

"Oh, no!" Mr. Marsh was untroubled by that. "You were like us, as far as

I can make out. Had to make the best of it. Now your captain...."

There was a fascination about the captain for Mr. Marsh. For twenty

years he had lived in a sort of middle-class and inconspicuous exile,

and destined, as far as he could discover, to remain for ever in the dry

and unromantic regions of a middle-class existence. Nothing, he was

often fond of saying to his friends, ever happened to him. The things

one reads of in books! he would exclaim, with a short grunting laugh of

humorous regret. Stories of fair Circassians, Balkan countesses, Turkish

beauties, Armenian damsels...! Where were they? He had married and

settled down here, and remained twenty years in all, and yet nothing had

happened. Yes, on the alert for twenty years to detect romantic

developments--he had a daughter sixteen years old--and until that ship

came in, not a chance! So he described it to his friends at Costi's and

at the Austrian Consulate, an immense villa in a charming garden farther

along in the Rue Parallel.

For somehow the arrival of that ship was a significant event in more

than the accepted sense. It was reserved for Mr. Marsh to perceive the

full romantic aspect of the adventure. For others it was a nine-day

wonder, an official nuisance or blessing, as suited the official

temperament to regard it. To Mr. Spokesly it was an exciting but

secondary factor leading up to the greater adventure of departure. It

was over-shadowed by the more perplexing problem of explaining himself

in a masterless vessel.

But Mr. Marsh, after twenty years, during which he had failed to detect

anything resembling romance in his life, when he was called out of his

bed at dawn that morning to go off as interpreter, saw the matter in a

very different light. Indeed he saw it in the light of romance. His

first comment when he found time to review his experiences was: "By

Jove, you can't beat that type! We shall always rule, always!" and his

bosom swelled at the thought of England. But it was his discovery of

Captain Rannie which remained with him as the great scene in the play.

He could not get it out of his mind. He told everybody about it. He

revealed a doubt whether other people fully appreciated the

extraordinary experience which had been his when he went down that dark

curving stairway, "not having the faintest notion, you know, whether I

wouldn't get knocked on the head or perhaps blown to bits," and found

the door resisting his efforts. An active intelligent resistance! he

declared, precisely as though the man were trying to keep him out. And

as time passed and the story developed in his own mind by the simple

process of continually repeating and brooding upon it, as an actor's

part becomes clearer to him by rendition, Mr. Marsh developed the theory

that when he first went down those stairs and tried to get in, the

resistance was in truth intelligent and alive.

He was explaining this new and intriguing "theory," as he called it, on

the following evening when Mr. Spokesly accompanied by the husband of

Esther, who was "in the Public Debt," entered the great room on the

second floor of the Consulate, a magnificent chamber whose windows

opened upon balconies and revealed, above the opposite roofs, rectangles

of luminous twilight. Some half-dozen gentlemen were seated on chairs in

the dusk about one of the balconies. As the newcomers arrived by a side

door a servant came in through the enormous curtains at the far end

bearing a couple of many-branched candlesticks and advanced towards a

table, thus revealing in some degree the elaborate design and shabby

neglect of the place. Huge divans in scarlet satin were ripped and

battered, the gilding of the sconces was tarnished and blackened, and

the parquetry flooring, of intricate design, was warped and loose under

the advancing foot. And above their heads, like shadowy wraiths, hung

immense candelabra whose lustres glittered mysteriously in the

candlelight under their coverings of dusty muslin.

Mr. Marsh was leaning his elbows on the balcony railing and facing his

audience as he explained his conviction that the captain had intended to

keep him out.

"I assure you," he was saying, and apparently he was directing his

remarks at someone who now heard the tale for the first time; "I assure

you, when I pushed the door and saw the man's shoulder, it moved. I mean

it actually quivered, apart from my movement of the door. It gave me a

very peculiar sensation, because when I spoke, there was no answer. Only

a quiver. And another thing. When I finally did shove the door open and

so shoved the captain over, the noise was not the noise of a dead inert

body, if you understand me. Not at all. It sounded as though he had

broken his fall somewhat! I can assure you----"

Mr. Marsh had enjoyed an excellent education in England. He had the

average Englishman's faculty of expressing himself in excellent

commonplaces so that every other Englishman knew exactly what he meant.

But his hearers on this occasion were not all Englishmen, and suddenly

out of the dusk of the corner came a voice speaking English but not of

England at all. Mr. Spokesly, standing a short distance off, was

startled at the full-throated brazen clang of it booming through the

obscurity of the vast chamber. It was a voice eloquent of youth and

impudent virile good-humour, a voice with a strange harsh under-twang

which the speaker's ancestors had brought out of central Asia, where

they had bawled barbaric war-songs across the frozen spaces.

"Broke his what? I don't understand what you mean," said the voice, and

a fair-haired young man in a gray uniform, a short, thick golden

moustache on his lip, came up suddenly out of the gloom into the

radiance of the candles and began to stride to and fro. The interruption

was trivial, yet it gave the key to the young man's character,

courageous, cultured, precise, and impatient of inferior minds.

"His fall," explained Mr. Marsh politely. "The point is, I believe he

was alive almost up to the moment, you know, of our entry. He even moved

slightly as I stepped in--a sort of last gasp. I even heard something of

that nature. A sigh. Good evening, gentlemen."

The last words were addressed to Mr. Spokesly and his friend in the

Public Debt, who crossed the path of the young man striding up and down

and were introduced to the company.

"You can corroborate what I say," said Mr. Marsh. "You know I mentioned

it at the time--a sort of sigh?"

"What is a sigh, or a moment, for that matter, more or less?" demanded

the young man striding up and down. "To me there is something much more

important in his motive. Why did this captain of yours end himself? This

is a question important to science. I am a student of Lombroso and Molle

and the Englishman Ellis. Was this man epileptic? Did he have delusions

of grandeur?"

"This gentleman," said Mr. Marsh, "was the officer on deck at the time,"

and he looked at Mr. Spokesly anxiously, as though waiting fresh details

of the affair.

"Yes, he had delusions," said Mr. Spokesly, clearing his throat.

"Thought everybody was against him. He took drugs too. My own idea is he

took the wrong stuff or too much of it, in his excitement. He was down

there in his room when we crashed. And he had another--delusion I

suppose you could call it. He didn't like women."

"Didn't like.... Well, who does?" challenged the vigorous metallic voice

with a carefully modified yet resonant laugh. One or two laughs, equally

modified, floated from obscure corners where cigar-ends glowed, and the

animated figure paused in its rapid movement. "I mean, no man likes

women as they are unless he is a true sensualist. What we aspire to is

the ideal they represent. Your captain must have been a sensualist."

"Because his last breath was a sigh, you mean?" said Mr. Marsh. "I heard

it you know. A long-drawn gasp."

"Precisely. The sigh of a sensualist leaving the world of the senses."

Mr. Spokesly stared at Mr. Marsh incredulously.

"I don't think you are 'right,'" he remarked, lighting a fresh

cigarette. "The captain was not that sort of man. He was timid, I admit.

He was scared of losing his life."

"Who isn't?" demanded the young man and was beginning another resonant

laugh when Mr. Spokesly broke in.

"A good many people," he said sharply, "under the right conditions.

Nobody _wants_ to get killed, we know. But that does not mean they

wouldn't take a risk."

"Well, didn't your captain take the risk?" said Mr. Marsh eagerly. "That

was just what...."

"He did but he always wore one of these inflating things," said Mr.

Spokesly quietly. "Vests you blow up when you want them. We had a

collision, as you know, and he had it on then. And when he heard us

crash I've no doubt he began to inflate it again."

"Then there is no use supposing he committed suicide," said a voice.

"That would be absurd."

"Not altogether," replied Mr. Spokesly. "I don't know whether you

gentlemen will think I am a bit mad for saying it, but after knowing

him, it's quite possible he took something to kill himself and then

tried to save himself from being drowned. There's a lot of difference

between being dragged under in a sinking ship, and gradually getting

sleepy and stiff in comfort, and don't you forget it. Humph!"

There was a silence for a moment when he ceased speaking, as though he

had propounded some new and incontrovertible doctrine of philosophy. The

young man who was walking up and down, almost vanishing in the gloom

down near the great smoke-coloured velvet curtains, halted and looked

interrogatively at Mr. Spokesly.

"But you have not explained why he should kill himself at all," he said.

"A man as you say scared of losing his life."

"Well," said Mr. Spokesly slowly. "He may have seen himself.... I mean

he may have realized he had lost his life already, as you might say."

"How, how?" demanded the young man, very much interested. "What do you

mean by already?"

"You might call it that," muttered Mr. Spokesly, "with his ideas about

women. Couldn't bear to talk about them. And he didn't like men much

better. So I say he'd lost his life already. Nothing to live for, if a

man hates women. And he did. That's one thing I am sure about."

"You are a psychologist," said the young man, very much amused. "You

believe in the inspiration of love."

"Naturally," said Mr. Spokesly. "A man believes in what he understands."

The young man nodded and turned away with the slight smile of one who

realizes he is dealing with a person of limited intelligence.

"You mean we believe in what we have cognition of," he amended in a

harsh tone. "No doubt you are right. But your captain may have had

beliefs and fidelities beyond your cognition. Perhaps he saw, suddenly,

as in a flash, you understand, the ultimate futility of existence. He

might. Englishmen don't as a rule. But if he had lived in the East a

long while, he might."

"But surely you don't advance that as a tenable hypothesis," exclaimed

Mr. Marsh. This man, who had contrived to retain the illusions and

metaphysics of the comfortably fixed classes of England amid the

magnificent scenery and human squalor of Ottoman life, was frankly

appalled by the young man's ferocious gaiety while he advanced what he

called his theory of philosophic nihilism. That was the disconcerting

feature of the affair. This Herr Leutnant Lietherthal actually spoke

with pleasure of a time when humanity should have ceased to exist! Mr.

Marsh would almost have preferred a technical enemy to desire the

extinction of Englishmen. It was more logical, and he said as much as

they adjourned to a smaller room to supper.

"Oh, don't I?" exclaimed the Herr Leutnant, holding up his glass of

Kümmel. That was his way of being revenged upon the country where he had

lived many happy years. At Oxford, whither the munificence of Rhodes

brought him, his sensuous mind had delighted in the apparently opposed

but really identical studies of philosophy and philology. Following the

example of his tutor at Leipzig, he had often neglected classrooms in

his studies in English, and gone into the slums of great towns and on

the dock-sides of London and Liverpool for idioms. And he got them. "Oh,

don't I?" he exclaimed, laughing, and added: "I go the whole hog, my

friend." And only that subtle under-twang, that strong humming of the

vocal chords in his vowels remained to detect him. He was addicted to

saying that he had discovered the secret of the English power, which

was, he announced, their mongrel origin. "A nation of mongrels who think

of nothing but thoroughbred horses and dogs," he had described them to

Evanthia, who could not possibly gauge the accuracy of the sentence.

Just now, as he set down his glass, he added that he went "the whole

hog, my friend, as your graceful English expresses it." And then, in

reply to Mr. Marsh's shocked comment, he said:

"Why? It would be of no advantage to desire the extinction of any white

race. This affair is only a family squabble. But it is a symptom. You

may be watching now the first convulsions of the disease by which Europe

will die. Europe is dying. The war, the war is only a superficial

disturbance. The trouble is deeper than the mud of Flanders, my friend.

Europe is dying because her inspiration, her ideals, are gone. That is

what I mean when I say Europe will die. The old fidelities are

departing. And when they are all dead, and Europe is a vast cesspool of

republicans engaged in mutual extermination, what will happen then, do

you think?"

"Why do you talk that mad stuff here?" grunted one of the guests, a

quiet middle-aged person with a monocle. He spoke in German, and

Lietherthal answered quickly:

"What difference, Oscar? They don't believe me."

"What will happen, I ask you?" he continued in a vibrating tone. "When

we have destroyed ourselves, and the survivors of our civilization are

creeping feebly about the country, going back little by little to the

agricultural age, the yellow men from Asia and the blacks from Africa

will come pouring into Europe. Millions of them. They will infest the

skeletons of our civilizations like swarms of black and yellow maggots

in the sepulchres of kings. And in the end humanity will cease to exist.

Civilization will be dead but there will be nobody to bury her," he

concluded, smiling. "Europe will be full of the odours of her

dissolution."

"I cannot believe," said Mr. Marsh with energy, "that any one would

seriously entertain such wild ideas. They imply the negation of all the

things we hold dear. I should commit suicide at once if I thought for a

single moment such an outcome was possible."

"Perhaps your captain had such a moment," suggested the young man,

busily eating fish. "Perhaps he saw, as I said, the futility of

existence."

"And you really believe there is no hope?"

"Hope!" echoed Lietherthal with a brazen-throated laugh. "Hear the

Englishman crying for his hope! By what right or rule of logic can we

demand an inexhaustible supply of hope, especially packed in

hundredweight crates for export to the British Colonies? Hope! The

finest brand on the market! Will not spoil in the tropics! Stow away

from boilers! Use no hooks! That's all an Englishman thinks of if you

ask him to consider a scientific question. Doctor, is there any hope?

Hope for himself, not for anybody else."

There was a murmur of laughter at this, a murmur in which even Mr. Marsh

joined, for he "could see a joke" as he often admitted. And as the meal

progressed and the excellent red wine passed, the young man revealed a

nimble mind, like quicksilver rather than firm polished metal, which ran

easily over the whole surface of life and entertained them with the

aptness and scandalous candour of its expression. To most of them, men

like Esther's husband, Mr. Jokanian, who had absorbed European ideas

through books, so that they had fermented within him in a black froth of

pessimism and socialistic bubbles, he was a blond angel from heaven. "A

man of remarkable ideas," he observed to Mr. Spokesly, who nodded.

"Remarkable is right," he muttered. He found himself withdrawing

instinctively from the highly charged intellectual atmosphere of this

community. As he ate his supper and drank the wine, he allowed his mind

to return to his own more immediate affairs. It might very well be that

civilization and even humanity would die out, but the urgency of the

problem was not apparent to a man about to go out on a hazardous

adventure with the woman he loved. Only that day he had worked with Mr.

Cassar, the engineer, who had been making a silencer for the motor. Not

that Mr. Spokesly was going to depend upon that. He had a mast and a

sail, for he knew the wind was off shore and easterly during the night,

and he could save his engine for the time when they had made the outer

arm of the Gulf. Mr. Cassar agreed because he thought they might be

short of gasolene in spite of the carefully stored supply. For Mr.

Cassar had decided to go with his commander. It had been borne in upon

Mr. Cassar that the family in Cospicua, for whom he was industriously

providing, might perish of starvation while he grew rich beyond the

dreams of avarice, if he could not send them any money--as he obviously

could not so long as he remained where he was. Mr. Cassar was not at all

clear as to the causes and extent of the war. All he knew was that he

now earned more money, and he naturally hoped it would go on as long as

possible. But he also knew enough of war to realize the limits set upon

enterprise, just as at sea one had to submit to the ways of the

elements. And he had inherited a placid contempt for everything Ottoman,

which minimized in his mind the difficulties of departure. And it may

have been also a sudden desire to see his wife in Cospicua. She had

written him, in a mixture of Maltese and Italian, with many corrections

and blots, which had caused the literary-minded censor in Saloniki much

trouble, thinking they concealed a cipher; and she had implored him to

come back to Valletta and get work in the dockyard. Then they could have

a house in Senglea and the children could go to a better school. This

was doubtless the underlying thought in Mr. Cassar's mind when he

decided to go along with Mr. Spokesly. And Mr. Spokesly, before going

over to the office of the Public Debt, to find Mr. Jokanian, had

mentioned that he would be going back rather late to Bairakli.

He sat now, the wine stimulating his mind to unwonted activity,

listening to the clever conversation of the blond young man. Mr.

Spokesly was quite prepared to admire him. It was, he reflected, very

wonderful how these chaps learned languages. He wished he could speak

these lingos. Here they were, German, Austrian, Armenian, Jew, all

speaking English. After all, there lay the triumph. As Mr. Marsh said,

you couldn't beat that type. "We" went everywhere and all men adopted

"our" language and "our" ideas. He heard the Herr Leutnant's tones as he

told Mr. Marsh that he himself admired the English. He had lived among

them for years. At one time was engaged to marry an _Engländerinn_. And

his conclusion was that they had nothing to fear from any other nation.

Their true enemies were within. The hitherto impregnable solidarity of

the race was disintegrating. Mr. Spokesly was not clear what this

signified. He knew it sounded like the stuff these clever foreigners

were always thinking up. When all was said and done, they were all out

to do the best they could for themselves. There was Marsh, living as

calm as you please in Ottoman territory and making a very decent income

in various ways. And there was a young fellow over there, with rich

auburn hair flung back from a fine reddish forehead, who had been

pointed out to him as the son of a rich old boy who had been there all

his life as a Turkey merchant, with great estates and a grand house at

Boudja where they were to hold a magnificent garden party to welcome the

old General on his arrival from a tour of inspection in Syria. Mr.

Spokesly had heard, too, of the way money was made just now, and he

smiled at the simplicity of it. There was the material in the cargo of

the _Kalkis_, hardware and flour and gasolene. A pretty rake-off some of

these intellectual Europeans had made out of that in what they called

transportation charges. And there was the Ottoman Public Debt they had

taken up, paying for it in paper and getting the interest in gold. They

were doing the best they could under the circumstances. He saw their

point of view well enough. He himself had another problem. He had to get

out of it. Mr. Spokesly, as he walked about that shining Levantine city,

as he passed down those narrow tortuous streets into bazaars reeking

with the strange odours of Asiatic life, as he watched the slow

oblivious life of the poor, and the sullen furtiveness of the Greek

storekeepers and shabby French bourgeoisie waiting in line at the custom

house for a chance to buy their morsels of food, saw with penetrating

clarity how impossible it would be for him to remain, even if he did get

a permanent harbour-master's job. No! He finished his glass of wine and

looked round for the decanter. He saw that these people here, for all

their intellectual superiority, their fluent social accomplishments,

their familiarity with philosophical compromises, were simply evading

the facts. They were variants of Mr. Jokanian, who was also reaching

regularly for the decanter, and who was attempting to forget a national

failure in high-sounding poppycock about the autocracy of the

proletariat. Mr. Marsh was proud of being an Englishman, in a well-bred

way, for he was always insisting "you could not beat that type"; but

what was his idea of an Englishman?

A person who, strictly speaking, no longer existed. Mr. Marsh was

fortunate in having his ideals and illusions preserved in the dry air of

the Levant as in a hermetically sealed chamber. The type he spoke of was

being very handsomely beaten in all directions and was being rescued

from utter annihilation by a very different type--the mechanical

engineer, who was no doubt preparing the world for a fresh advance upon

its ultimate destruction. Mr. Spokesly, in a rich glow of exaltation,

saw these vast and vague ideas parade in his mind as he listened

abstractedly to the conversation. But as the wine passed, that cosmic

quality passed, too, and he began to hear other things besides theories

of evolution. He heard someone remark that they had a very fine piano, a

Bechstein grand. Some consul had brought it from Vienna for his musical

daughter. But it was impossible to take it with them when he was

transferred to Teheran. Another voice desired to know what was done with

the musical daughter, and amid laughter they began to push their chairs

back, lighting cigarettes and lifting liqueurs to carry them to another

room.

Looking down into a courtyard which contained, amid much rank

vegetation, an empty marble basin surmounted by a one-legged Diana with

a broken bow, and a motor car with only three wheels and no engine, Mr.

Spokesly leaned out to watch the moon setting over the dark masses of

the neighbouring roofs. Behind him the Bechstein grand was surrounded by

some half-dozen gentlemen explaining their preferences, laughing,

whistling a few notes, and breaking into polite cries of wonder.

Suddenly there was a silence, and Mr. Marsh, seated at the instrument

and running his hands over the keys in a highly versatile fashion, began

"John Peel" in a high thin tenor that sounded as though it came from

behind the neighbouring mountain. Thin yet sweet, so that the peculiar

sentiment of the song, dedicated "to that type" which Mr. Marsh so much

admired, reached Mr. Spokesly as he leaned out and noted the sharp,

slender black shapes of the cypresses silhouetted against the dark blue

vault of the sky with its incredibly brilliant stars. He smiled and

reflected that the moon would be gone in a couple of hours, a red globe

over Cordelio. In a few nights it would set before night-fall. He drank

his liqueur. A moonless night and he would be away from all this. He

wished he were back at Bairakli now. He grudged every moment away from

her. He had caught her making little preparations of her own, and when

he had chaffed her she had looked at him in an enigmatic way with her

bright amber eyes, her beautiful lips closed, and gently inhaling

through her nostrils. What an amazing creature she was! He would sit and

watch her in the house, entranced, oblivious of time or destiny. He

wished Mrs. Dainopoulos could know of his happiness. He never suspected

that when Mrs. Dainopoulos at length heard of this episode, it was

expressed in a single shrug of the shoulders and a faint vanishing

smile. The song ended with a tinkle:

"_Oh, I ken John Peel, from my bed where I lay,

As he passed with his hounds in the morning!_"

and there was a murmur of applause. Mr. Spokesly, looking out into the

darkness, clapped and lit another cigarette. He was startled by a great

crash of chords. The young man, a cigar in his teeth, his head enveloped

in a blue cloud of smoke, was seated at the piano. Mr. Spokesly turned

and watched him. Mr. Marsh came over to the window, smiling.

"D'you do anything?" he asked. "We should be delighted, you know, if you

would. It relieves the tension, don't you think?"

"Not in my line, I'm afraid," said Mr. Spokesly. "I never had any

accomplishments."

He stood listening to the full, rounded, clangorous voice, toned down to

Heine's beautiful words:

"_Die Luft ist kühl und dunkelt,

Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein,

Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt

Im Abend Sonnenschein._"

"Wonderful voice," whispered Mr. Marsh. "Studied at Leipzig. Rather a

talented chap, don't you think? By the way, I heard to-night they intend

making an inspection of the outer harbour while they are here. Improving

the defences. They don't want any more ships to come in the way you did.

Of course it was luck as well as pluck. Probably lay fresh mines."

"Is that a fact?" asked Mr. Spokesly. As in a dream he heard the

applause, himself clapping mechanically and then the booming of bass

chords. And a voice like a silver trumpet, triumphant and vibrating,

blared out the deathless call of the lover to his beloved:

"_Isolde! Geliebte! Bist du mein?

Hab ich dich wieder?_"

"Well it's pretty reliable. A friend of mine who is in the timber

trade--got a saw mill up at Menenen and uses horses--has been given a

contract to bring down a lot of stones to the harbour. Fill all those

lighters, you know. That'll mean quite a lot of work for you, eh?"

Mr. Spokesly turned resolutely to the window and looked out over the

dark roofs at the lustrous and spangled dome of the sky. He would have

to find Cassar and give him some instructions at once. It would be

impossible to get away if they waited for a swarm of workmen and

officials to come down and be for ever sailing up and down the Gulf. He

ought to have thought of such a contingency. He must find Cassar. And

then he must get back to Evanthia and tell her they must go at once.

To-morrow night. He heard the heavy stamp of feet that greeted the end

of the song and joined in without thinking. As he walked across to the

door Mr. Marsh followed him, and Mr. Jokanian, his dark yearning eyes

brilliant with the wine he had drunk, came over making gestures of

protestation as another voice rose from behind the grand piano:

"_Enfant, si j'étais Roi, je donnerais l'empire,

Et mon char, et mon sceptre, et mes peuples à genoux,

Et mon couronne d'or, et mes bains de porphyre._"

"I am coming back," said Mr. Spokesly, "but I must see if my boat is

ready."

"You don't need any boat," said Mr. Jokanian. "We are going back in my

carriage. Mr. Lietherthal goes with us. I have invited him."

"_Pour un regard de vous!_" sang the voice, and trembled into a

passionate intricacy of arpeggios.

"I shall not be long," he repeated. "I must tell my man I sha'n't need

it, in that case."

He felt he must get out of there at once, if only for a moment. This

combination of wine and music was becoming too much for him. As he came

out into the courtyard he heard Victor Hugo's superb challenge ring out:

"_Enfant, si j'étais Dieu, je donnerais le Ciel!_"

He walked quickly along in the profound shadow of the Rue Parallel until

he reached the great doors of the Passage Kraemer. Here he might have

seen, had he been watchful, in a corner by the disused elevator of the

hotel, the young Jew talking to a girl in cap and apron. The youth saw

him and clutched his companion's arm.

"Madama's husband," he whispered. "The Englishman."

"Well," said the girl, bending her dark brows upon the figure hurrying

out upon the quay, "I think your Madama is a fool."

"S-sh!" whimpered the young man. "She is the most glorious creature in

the world."

"And a fool," repeated the girl. "That other upstairs in Suite Fourteen

will desert her in a month. I know his style. He only left the last one

in Kara-hissar, so his servant told us. I know if _I_ had a chance of

marrying an Englishman.... Yes! She has got you anyhow," she added,

laughing. "You are like a cony in love with a snake."

He put up his hand in warning, as though he feared by some occult power

Madama would hear these rash and sacrilegious words. He took out a tiny

piece of paper and looked at it.

"I must go," he said. "You are certain it is this Frank, who has come?"

he urged anxiously.

"Yes," she said, smiling contemptuously. "When I passed him in the

corridor, he put his arm round me and said he would love me for ever.

You can tell your Madama if you like."

Mr. Spokesly, unaware of this conversation, made his way out, and was on

the point of crossing the quay by the custom house when Mr. Cassar, who

was drinking a glass of syrup at the café opposite, ran over and

accosted him.

"Look here----" began Mr. Spokesly.

"I know," interrupted the engineer. "I've heard something else. Don't go

over there now. I want to tell you this. Very important, Captain. Will

you have a drink?"

"Coffee," said Mr. Spokesly, sitting at a table in front of a small

café. "What is it?"

"I was working on the boat this afternoon, after you had been there,"

said Mr. Cassar, "and I got that silencer pretty good now, and some

officers come up and say, this boat very good, we will want it. They

make inspection of harbour, you understand. I say, all right, what time?

They say to-morrow. The General he go round and make inspection. Want

all three motor boats. I say all right. But I was waiting to see you. If

I miss you I was going out to find you at your house. You understand?"

Mr. Spokesly nodded. He understood perfectly well. He reflected upon the

wisdom of staying away from the Consulate after saying he would go back.

He decided it would be better to return.

"You will have to get off," said Mr. Cassar in a matter-of-fact tone as

he looked away towards the mountains. "Don't you think so, Captain?"

"Plenty of time," Mr. Spokesly muttered, "before daylight. Are you sure

you are all right? Got everything?"

"Yes, everything," said Mr. Cassar positively.

"Right," said his commander. "Now you tell the customs guard I return to

Bairakli at midnight. You go with me to bring the boat back as they want

it in the morning. And if I don't come before one o'clock, you go alone.

I shall be going by road. Some of them asked me to go with them. You go

alone and wait for me at the bath-house jetty. Can you remember that?"

"Easy," said Mr. Cassar. "It is ten o'clock now."

"I'll go back," said Mr. Spokesly.

The evening was just beginning along the front as he passed once again

through the great Passage beneath the hotel. There was no young Jew

watching him now. That highly strung and bewildered creature was

hurrying through the lower town on his way to Bairakli, bearing

authentic news for his mistress. He had an uneasy suspicion that the

person described by his friend in the hotel would not prove so good a

friend as Mr. Spokesly. But he hurried on past the little Turkish shops,

his fez on the back of his head, the lamplight reflected on the bony

ridge of the large glistening nose that rose up between his scared pale

eyes and sallow cheeks. All along the lonely road beyond the railway

station he tripped and stumbled, muttering to himself: "Oh, Madama, he

is come, he is come! I bring great news. He is come!" Sometimes he

clasped his hands in an ecstasy of emotion and would almost fall into

some unnoticed slough or channel by the way. All the griefs of the poor

seemed to concentrate themselves upon him as he moaned and staggered.

"Father of Israel, what shall I do if she abandon me? There is no food

for a fatherless boy here. Oh, Madama!"

But when at length he scrambled up to the house on the hillside and saw

his mistress and Esther Jokanian sitting in the window overlooking the

sea, he took heart again. When Evanthia, leaning out in a loose robe

that showed transparent against the lamp behind her, called, "Who is

there?" he replied that it was her faithful servant with news. She came

down like a swiftly moving phantom and unlocked the gate, pulling it

wide with her characteristic energy and courage.

"Speak!" she said in a thrilling, dramatic whisper, all her soul

responding to the moment. The youth held out his hand palm upward while

he leaned his head against the rough wall.

"Oh, Madama, he is come," he replied in a low tone, as though he sensed

the formidable importance of his words in their lives. She stood staring

at him for a second and then, pulling him in, she closed the gate with a

tremendous clang that jarred the very foundation of his reason. It was

at times like these that this young man, born into a chaotic world of

alien beings intent upon inexplicable courses of action, inspired by

unknown and possibly sinister ideals, was upon the point of dashing his

head with maniac energy against those heavy ancient stones which, by

comparison, seemed less foreign to his distracted soul.

"Come," she said with a mysterious smile. "Your fortune is made. You

must go back with a message."

"Oh, Madama!" he wailed.

She dragged him up the steps leading to the rooms above.

"Endlich!" she cried to Esther, who sat by the window, chin on hand, and

muttering in her husky man's voice. "He is here. I must have been born

with good fortune after all."

"You are throwing away the greatest chance in your life," growled Esther

without looking at her. The young man gave a stifled yelp and choked,

holding his arms out as though in supplication. They looked at him, but

he could not proceed. His courage failed as his exacerbated imagination

pictured the tigerish glare in Evanthia's eyes if he should tell her

about the last one that was left at Kara-hissar. He put a hand to his

throat and mumbled: "The message, Madama? It is late."

"You do not understand," said Evanthia crossly to her friend. "What do

you think I am made of? Do you think I can go on for ever like this,

pretending love? Men! I use them, my friend. The lover of my heart is

here, and you ask me to go out on that cursed water to a country where

it is dark wet fog all the time. What should I do there? My God, are you

mad? Now I shall go to Europe, and for once I shall live. Ah! The

message! Here!" She dragged a blank page from a yellow paper-covered

volume lying on a cedar-wood console and hunted for a pencil. With a

fragment of black crayon she began to scrawl her name in staggering

capitals. "So!" she muttered. "Now I shall put the words _liebe dich_.

Sacré! When I go to Europe I will learn this writing--or have a

secretary. There! It is enough for my dear lunatic. Take it!" She folded

it and gave it to the youth who stood by the door dejectedly. "Ask for

the Herr Leutnant Lietherthal. Go down and eat first." She gave him a

pat on the shoulder that seemed to put a fresh stream of life into him,

and he disappeared.

"Take care, Esther, do not tell him a word of this. Or thy husband

either. He might speak in forgetfulness."

"It is nothing to me," muttered Esther. "I like him, that is all. And

fidelity is best."

"Fidelity!" said Evanthia slowly. "And is not this fidelity? Have I not

followed the lover of my heart across the world? If the father of thy

boy came up here and knocked at the gat.... You talk! I am not a

white-faced Frank girl to be a slave of an Englishman! He gives me all

his money here, yes. But in his England, when I am shut up in the fog

and rain, how much will I get, _hein_?" her voice rose to a shout, a

brazen clangour of the throat, and her hand shot out before her,

clenched, as though she were about to hurl thunderbolts.

"Very well," assented Esther in a low tone, "but you don't know if the

lover of your heart wants you any more. The lovers of the heart are

funny fish," she added grimly.

"Prrtt! You are right," said Evanthia in an ordinary tone. "Did I say I

was going away to-night, stupid?"

"I see the light of the boat," said Esther. "Perhaps my husband is with

him. I must go back to my house."

"No! Stay here a little." Evanthia laid hold of her. "To-night I must

have someone with me. I am shaken in my mind. I shall want to shriek.

Stay."

"It is at the jetty," said Esther soberly. She looked out into a dense

darkness, and in the lower distance she could see a tiny light where the

launch had run alongside the old bath-house jetty. And then the light

went out.

They waited in silence, smoking cigarettes, until their quick ears

caught the sound of footsteps on the hillside. And then the grind of a

key in the great lock of the gate.

As Mr. Spokesly came into the room he barely sensed the tension of the

atmosphere. He broke breathlessly into his news at once.

"Quick!" he said in a low tone. "We must go to-night, dear. After

to-night I may not have any boat. It is all ready. Come now. We have

time to get out of sight of land before daylight."

"To-night!" exclaimed Evanthia, clutching her breast, and thinking

rapidly. "Impossible."

"It will be impossible any other night," he retorted gently. "We _must_

go."

Evanthia backed away, thinking clearly, concisely, and skilfully behind

her astonishment. He turned to Esther.

"You tell her," he said. "We must go. It is our last chance. It was

lucky I heard about it. They are going to fortify the Gulf. Go and get

ready, dear. Bring me a blanket and I'll carry it down, and some bread

and meat. Enough for a day, anyhow."

"Where is my 'usband'?" demanded Esther.

"He's coming by the road. He's got some friends with him, from the

hotel. You mustn't mind them being a bit elevated. Plenty of wine

to-night. They will be here soon, I expect. I want to get down and away

before they arrive."

Evanthia, folding a blanket in the bedroom, stood perfectly still. She

could hear her own pulses thumping, and she put her hand to her throat.

She felt as though her heart would burst if she did not gain control of

herself. She stood perfectly still thinking, her mind darting this way

and that, as a trapped animal tests the resistance of the trap in every

direction. For a moment she thought of killing him as they went down to

the boat. She was strong: she felt she could do it. Under the

shoulder-blades and in the throat. No, she must wait. Only as a last

resource, that. She folded up the blanket and walked back into the room

to give him the food.

He stood for a moment with the blanket and loaves of bread in his arms,

unable to utter what he felt for her sacrifice for him. He could only

say stumblingly:

"I sha'n't forget this. I know that much," and hurried away with his

burden.

Esther sprang up from her seat by the window. Her misfortunes had not

made her hard. She saw a light in Evanthia's amber eyes as she made her

preparations, a light that frightened her.

"Nobody will ever be able to do anything with you," she muttered. "I

must go home to get supper for my husband. You got a good man, and you

throw him away like so much rubbish. You got no sense."

"I go!" said Evanthia, pausing with her hands full of things she was

stuffing into a bag. "Do I not go?"

"You go!" said Esther savagely. "You make him take you to the town to

see your fellow."

"Oh!" exclaimed Evanthia, stopping again and stifling a laugh. She had

not thought of such a thing. "What you must think of me!" she murmured.

"And then tell him you are finished. You have a heart, yes, as big as

that ring on your finger. You take everything from him, and now you...."

With a sudden gesture of rage the girl flung the things away and stood

up to her friend.

"I'll kill you!" she growled through her teeth. "I know you! You are

jealous, jealous, jealous! I see you talk, talk English to him at the

bath-house. I see you go out with him for the walk through the village.

I hear you talk to him about that girl Vera he saw once in Odessa. All

right! Go with him! Go! Here are the things. Take them! I spit at you.

You...."

She fell back, exhausted with the ferocity of her passion, her hands

still making gestures of dismissal to the silent and scornful Esther who

remained motionless yet alert, ready to take her own part.

"You are altogether mad!" she said at last in her husky tones. "Here is

your husband. Tell him, tell him...."

Evanthia spun round where she stood with her hands on her bosom.

"We must go, dear," said Mr. Spokesly and paused in astonishment at the

scene. With a convulsive movement the girl tore at her dress and then

flung out her hand towards the shore.

"Go then, go! Why do you come here any more? You want her. There she is,

jealous because all the men want me. Look at her. She ask you with her

eyes. Oh, yah! I hate you! I never love you. It is finish. Go!"

"Eh!" he called, swallowing hard. He looked at Esther in amazement.

"What is this?" he asked. "What have you said to her? My dear!"

"You better go," said Esther sullenly. "She won't go with you. Can't you

see?"

"But how can I go without her?" he exclaimed.

"I kill myself before I go. This is my place. Go back, you. I hate you."

Esther came over to him and, taking up the satchel, thrust him out

before her. Down the steps and across the dark garden she went with him,

and only when the great gate clanged did he make an effort to break

through the dreadful paralysis of mind that had assailed him.

"What made her go on like that?" he demanded drearily.

"Go on. I tell you in a minute. You men, you got no sense."

"But what did she mean, about you?"

"Nothing. She's crazy. You no understand."

"You said yourself she'd come," he insisted.

"Yes, I _say_ so. I tell her she better come. But you no understand

women."

He was destined to find out, as years went by, that this was true. And

when they stood on the jetty and looked down into the obscurity where

Mr. Cassar sat in the boat patiently awaiting his passengers, Mr.

Spokesly began to regain command of himself. For a moment, up there, he

had been all abroad. The sudden emotional upheaval hardened his resolve.

"Well!" he said with a sudden intake of breath, and paused, once more

overwhelmed by the change in his affairs. "I don't know what to say,

Esther." He put his hand on her shoulder and she twisted away a little.

"I feel as if I'd been having a long dream, and just woke up."

"Go!" she said huskily. "Good-bye. Good fortune. There is a carriage

coming. My 'usban'."

"Anyhow ... Esther. I did what I promised her to do ... not my fault."

He got down into the boat "Where's your hand? Good-bye ... good-bye....

Push off, son, push off.... After all I done...."

They saw, from a little way off, the white form of Esther spring forward

and vanish behind the buildings as a feeble yellow flicker from a

carriage lamp crawled slowly along the road and stopped. They heard

laughter and confused arguments.

"Drunk!" whispered Mr. Cassar without either envy or malice.

"Full to the guards," assented his commander. "Hark!"

Someone was singing, a full youthful voice of brazen vibrant quality, a

voice with an ineluctable and derisive challenge to confident hearts.

Though he did not understand the words, Mr. Spokesly was aware of this

challenge as he listened:

"_Auf, deutches Volk, du stark Geschlecht

Es schlug die grosse Stunde,

Steh auf und sei nicht länger Knecht

Mit Kraft und mut steh für dein Recht

Im heilgen Volke bunde!_"

There was a pause, with protests and guttural amusement which were

suddenly engulfed in a clarion shout:

"_Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten!_"

"Go ahead," said Mr. Spokesly, looking back as he sat in the stern, "and

make as little noise as you can."

Out of the darkness came the faint clarion call he had already heard

that night:

"_Isolde! Geliebte! Bist du mein?_"

and the sound, with its echoes from the mountain, seemed to stream out

of that open window he had left. Suddenly, with a resolute movement, he

turned and bent to the business of steering. The boat was moving through

the water.

"Let her out," he muttered, looking at his watch. "We've got four hours

to daylight."

And the dawn found him there, still crouching motionless at the tiller,

while behind them the mountains of Lesbos rose enormous, the sun rising

over Asia. And ahead lay the dark sparkle of an empty sea.

CONCLUSION

"All I can say is," said the elderly lieutenant, and he applied himself

assiduously to the trimming of his nails, "you were in luck all

through."

"Yes," said Mr. Spokesly. "I suppose you can call it that."

He was not entirely satisfied that this constituted an adequate

description of his experiences. Luck is a slippery word. As witness the

old lieutenant, intent on his nails, like some red-nosed old animal

engaged in furbishing his claws, who proceeded without looking up:

"Why, what else could you call it? You surely didn't want that woman

hanging round your neck all your life like a mill-stone, did you? What

if she did keep hold of the money? I call it cheap at the price. And

suppose you'd brought her. How could you have squared things? _I_ call

it lucky."

Mr. Spokesly, however, did not feel that way. He looked round at the

green expanse of St. James's Park and up towards the enormous arch which

enshrines the dignity and cumbrous power of the Victorian Age, and

wondered if the taste of life would ever come back. It was now eighteen

months since he had experienced what the elderly lieutenant called

uncommon luck, when a sloop of war, hurrying on her regular patrol from

Lemnos to Malta had found him and Mr. Cassar in their boat some ten

miles east of Psara Island, a black spot on a blue sea, over which there

fluttered a patch of white. And on coming cautiously alongside, the

commander of that sloop was surprised to discover a Maltee engineer

somewhat in disarray through his struggles with his engine, and under a

blanket in the bilge forward a sick Englishman.

For Mr. Spokesly had been sick. Looking back at it from this seat in St.

James's Park, with his demobilization completed, he saw well enough that

the culmination of the spiritual stresses under which he had been

existing had been suddenly transmuted into a bodily collapse. As the sun

rose over the Ægean, he had given the tiller to Mr. Cassar and lain down

without a word. He had not cared whether he ever got up or not. He lay

staring up at the extraordinary brilliance of the sky, his throat very

sore, his eyes tired and smarting, a feverish tremor in his limbs,

refusing food, and even when the engine stopped, giving no sign that he

was aware of any change in their fortunes. It had only been when Mr.

Cassar informed him of the sloop bearing down upon them that he rose on

an elbow and croaked hoarsely:

"Show a white flag; handkerchief or something," and fell back, drawing

the blanket over himself. He had been very sick. The surgeon, without

waiting for a temperature reading, had carried him away into an

extremely hygienic sick-bay, where between a boy with tonsillitis and a

stoker with a burnt arm, he had lain all the way to Malta. And after

that, during weeks of dreary waiting, he had looked out of the high

windows of the Bighi Hospital across the Harbour to Valletta, watching

the ships go in and out, and seeing the great flame of the sunset show

up the battlements of the Lower Barracca and die in purple glory behind

the domes and turrets of the city.

For it seemed to him, in his intervals of lucid reflection, that the

taste of life had gone, not to return. It had gone, and in place of it

was an exceedingly bitter flavour of humiliation and frustrated dreams.

It was almost too sudden a revelation of his own emotional folly for any

feeling save a numb wonder to remain. He had told Esther that he felt as

though he had had a long dream and was suddenly woke up. And while this

was true enough of his mind, which maintained a dreary alertness during

his sickness, his heart on the other hand was in a condition of stupor

and oblivious repose. Even when sufficiently recovered to walk abroad

and sit at the little tables in the arcades by the Libreria, or to

journey across the Marsamuscetto to Sliema and follow the long smooth

white beach, he moved slowly because he had no accurate means of gauging

his intensity of existence. He would mutter to himself in a sort of

depressed whisper: "What's the matter with me, I wonder?"

The surgeons had called it something ending in osis and prescribed

finally "light duty." He remembered that light duty now well enough; a

commission as lieutenant and the visiting of many offices in the

formidable buildings which constituted the dockyard. And gradually, as

the scope and meaning of this work became apparent, he found a certain

interest returning, an anticipation of the next week and perhaps month.

But of the years he did not dare to think just yet.

Because, once established there, he had sought, as a homing pigeon its

cotes, to find Ada. He had written, full of weariness and a sort of

gentle contrition, and implored her to write. He had missed all the

mails since the _Tanganyika_ had gone--she must make allowances for the

hazards of the sea, and try again. He had put a shy, boyish postscript

to it, a genuine afterthought--"I want so much to see you again," and

mailed it on the Marseilles boat.

To that there had come nothing in reply save a letter from her married

sister, who evaded the subject for three pages and finally explained

that her own husband was missing and Ada was married. The paper had

distinctly said all were lost on the _Tanganyika_. Ada's husband was a

manufacturer of munitions in the Midlands, making a colossal income, she

believed. They lived in a magnificent old mansion in the West Riding.

The writer of the letter was going up to spend a week with them and

would be sure to mention him. She had already sent on his letter and Ada

had asked her to write.

There it was, then. Both ends of the cord on which he had been

precariously balanced had been cut down, and he had had no interior

buoyancy which could have kept him from hitting the earth with

conclusive violence. And near the earth for a long time he had remained,

very much in doubt whether he would ever go about again with the old

confidence. Possibly he would never have done so, had not an accident

sent him out to sea on patrol service. Here came relief in the shape of

that active enemy he had preferred to his bureaucratic and scornful

government. Here was an invisible and tireless adversary, waiting days,

weeks, and possibly months for his chance, and smashing home at last

with horrible thoroughness. This, in Mr. Spokesly's present condition,

was a tonic. He got finally into a strange, shuttle-like contraption

with twin gasolene-engines, a pop-gun, and a crew of six. They went out

in this water-roach and performed a number of deeds which were

eventually incorporated in official reports and extracted by inaccurate

special correspondents whose duty it was to explain naval occasions to

beleaguered England, an England whose neglect of seamen was almost

sublime until the food-ships were threatened.

So he had found a niche again in life, and very slowly the dead flat

look in his face gave way to one of sharp scrutiny. When he came ashore

from his cock-boat he would go to a hotel in a street like a scene from

the _Tales of Hoffmann_, and he would sleep in a great bed in a mighty

room where papal legates had snored in preceding centuries, and the

rulers of commanderies had dictated letters to the grand masters of

their order. But even there, in that seclusion and fine repository of

faith and peace, he dared not recall that last adventure at Bairakli,

that catastrophe of his soul. Even the banjo of the occupant of the next

room, a nice-looking boy with many medals and a staff appointment, did

not mean much to him. He listened apathetically to the nice young voice

singing a Kipling ballad:

"_Funny an' yellow an' faithful--

Doll in a tea-cup she were,

But we lived on the square, like a true-married pair,

An' I learned about women from 'er!_"

But the nice boy had never lived and never would live with anybody on

such terms, and his clear young voice lacked the plangent irony of the

battered idealist. It was perfectly obvious that he was entirely

ignorant of the formidable distortion of character which living with

people brought about. He evidently imagined marriage was a good joke and

living with girls a bad joke. Mr. Spokesly would lie on his huge bed and

try to get his bearings while his neighbour gave his version of "Keep

the Home Fires Burning" and "I'd Wait Till the End of the World for

You." He was visible sometimes, on his balcony overlooking the steep Via

Sant' Lucia raising his eyes with a charming and entirely idiotic

diffidence to other balconies where leaned dark-browed damsels, and

dreaming the bright and honourable dreams of the well-brought-up young

Englishman. Mr. Spokesly got no assistance from such as he. Even in his

most fatuous moments he had known that for them the war was only an

unusually gigantic and bloody football match, for which they claimed the

right to establish the rules. When it was over we would all go back to

our places in the world and touch our hats to them, the landed gentry of

mankind.

Sitting on his park-seat, under the shadow of Victoria's triumphal arch,

Mr. Spokesly saw this would not be the case. Behind his own particular

problem, which was to regain, somehow or other, the taste of life, he

saw something else looming. How were these very charming and delightful

beings, the survivors of an age of gentles and simples, of squires and

serfs, to be aroused to the fact that they were no longer accepted as

the heirs of all the ages? How to make them see the millions of people

of alien races moving slowly, like huge masses of rotting putrescence,

to a new life? Indeed, they were very fond of using those words "rotten"

and "putrid" for alien things they did not like. He felt sure they would

apply both to Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, and those men he met at the

Consulate. And with a twinge he reflected they might say the same thing

about Evanthia, if they knew it all. Yet they must be made to know,

those of them who were left, that the game was up for the cheerful

schoolboy with no ascertainable ideas. The very vitality of these alien

races was enough to sound a warning. "After all," Mr. Marsh had said in

his throaty way, "you can't beat that type, you know." And the question

looming up in the back of Mr. Spokesly's mind, as he sat on that seat in

St. James's Park, was: "Couldn't you?"

He discovered with a shock that his friend the elderly lieutenant, who

had been visiting the Admiralty that morning and so had met Mr.

Spokesly, was explaining something:

"I told him that taking everything into consideration, I really couldn't

see my way. Not now. You see, we aren't getting any younger, and my wife

is so attached to Chingford she won't hear of leaving. And of course I

couldn't go out _there_ alone now."

"Where did you say it was?" Mr. Spokesly asked. He had not heard.

"West Indies. It's a new oiling station and they want an experienced

harbour-master. You see, I knew about it, oh, years ago, when the place

was first projected, and I put in for it. And now he's offered it to me,

I can't go. I don't have to, you see. And yet I would like to put

someone in the way of it for the old chap's sake. So I say, why don't

you go round and see him? Three hundred a year and quarters. It isn't so

dusty, I can assure you. If I hadn't been rather lucky in my investments

I would be very glad to go, I can tell you that."

And the odd thing, to Mr. Spokesly's mind, was that he did not envy his

elderly friend's happy position as to his investments. Here again luck

masqueraded as a slippery word. Was he so lucky? From where he sat now,

beneath the Arch of the great queen of the money-making, steam-engine

era--the era, that is, when the steam-engines made the money and the old

order fattened upon rents and royalties--Mr. Spokesly was able to see

that money was no longer an adequate gauge of a man's calibre. One had

to grow, and that was another name for suffering. In his hand was a

newspaper, and as he turned it idly, his eye caught an urgent message in

heavy type. The London School of Mnemonics pleaded with him to join up

in the armies of Efficiency. They urged him to get out of the rut and

fit himself for executive positions with high salaries attached. His eye

wandered from the paper to the vista of the Mall, where the metallic

products of efficiency were ranged in quadruple lines of ugliness, the

stark witnesses of human ineptitude. He saw the children playing about

those extraordinarily unlovely enemy guns, their muzzles split and

dribbling with rust, their wheels splayed outwards like mechanical

paralytics, and he fell to wondering if he could not find his way out of

his spiritual difficulties sooner if he did what his friend suggested.

He would have to do something. A few hundred pounds was all he had. And

the chances of a sea job were not immediately promising. He recalled his

visit the other day to the office of the owners of the _Tanganyika_, and

the impression he had gained that their enthusiasm had cooled. They had

done a big business with Bremen before the war, and they would be doing

a big business again soon. Their attitude had contrasted oddly with the

roll-of-honour tablet in the office where, printed in gold, he had seen

the names of the officers of the _Tanganyika_ "murdered by the enemy."

All save his own. Somehow that word "murdered," to him who had been

there, did not ring true. It was like the nice schoolboy's "rotten" and

"putrid"; it signified a mood, now gone no one knew where. It was like

Lietherthal's "_Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten_," a gesture which meant

nothing to the millions of Hindoos, Mongolians, Arabs, Africans, and

Latins in the world. "A family squabble," that sharp young man had

called it, a mere curtain-raiser to a gigantic struggle for existence

between the races....

He rose and turned to his friend.

"It's the very thing for me," he said. "I don't feel any particular

fancy for staying on in England."

"As soon as I saw you waiting in that corridor," said his friend, "I

thought of it. Now you go and see him. You know the Colonial Office.

He's a fine old boy and a thorough gentleman. There are prospects, too,

I may tell you. It's a sugar-cane country, and I believe you'll have

some very nice company in the plantations all round. And I believe

there's a pension after twenty years. Well ... not that you'll need to

bother about it by that time.... As I say, it's a jumping-off place.

Fine country, you know. But what about a little drink? I know a place in

Chandos Street--they know me there. And now about coming down to

Chingford...."

Mr. Spokesly accompanied his friend through the great Arch of Victoria

into the Square and as they made their way round by the National Gallery

he reached a decision. He would go. His elderly friend, toddling beside

him, added details which only confirmed the decision. That gentleman

knew a good thing. He himself, however, having more by luck than

judgment held on to his shipping shares, was now in a position of

comfortable independence. He had served his country and sacrificed his

sons and now he was going to enjoy himself for the rest of his life.

After drawing enormous interest and bonuses he had sold at the top of

the market and was buying bonds "which would go up" a stockbroking

friend had told him. "A safe six hundred a year--what do I want with

more?" he wheezed as they entered the place in Chandos Street. "My dear

wife, she's so nervous of these shipping shares; and there's no doubt

they _are_ a risk. Mine's a large port-wine, please."

Yes, he would go, and it interested Mr. Spokesly to see how little his

tender and beautiful picture of two old people "going down the hill

together" appealed to him. With a sudden cleavage in the dull mistiness

which had possessed his heart for so long, he saw that there was

something in life which they had missed. He saw that if a man sets so

low a mark, and attains it by the aid of a craven rectitude and animal

cunning, he will miss the real glory and crown of life, which by no

means implies victory. He was prepared to admit he had not done a great

deal with his own life so far. But he was laying a new course. The night

he received his instructions to depart he walked down to the river and

along the embankment to his hotel with a novel exaltation of spirit. The

taste of life was coming back. He saw, in imagination, that new place to

which he was bound, a tiny settlement concealed within the secure

recesses of a huge tropical harbour. He saw the jetty, with its two red

lights by the pipe-line and the verandahed houses behind the groves of

Indian laurel. He saw the mountains beyond the clear water purple and

black against the sunset or floating above the mist in the crystal

atmosphere of the dawn. He saw the wide clean space of matted floors and

the hammock where he would lie and watch the incandescent insects moving

through the night air. He saw himself there, an integral part of an

orderly and reasonable existence. He had no intention of wasting his

life, but he saw that he must have time and quiet to find his bearings

and make those necessary affiliations with society without which a man

is rootless driftage. He saw that the lines which had hitherto held him

to the shore had been spurious and rotten and had parted at the first

tension.

There was time yet. What was it the elderly lieutenant had called her?

"A mill-stone round your neck all your life." No, he could not take that

view. He did not regret that supreme experience of his life. He recalled

the swift derisive gesture she had once flung at him as she spurned his

reiterated fidelity: "You learn from me, to go back to an Englishwoman."

Even now he delighted in the splendid memory of her charm, her delicious

languors and moments of melting tenderness, her anger and sometimes

smouldering rage. No, he did not regret. It was something achieved,

something that would be part of him for ever. He could go forward now

into the future, armed with knowledge and the austere prudence that is

the heritage of an emotional defeat. He looked out across the river and

saw the quick glow of an opened cupola in a foundry on the Surrey Side.

There was a faint smile on his face, an expression of resolution, as

though in imagination he were already in his island home, watching the

glow of a cane-fire in a distant valley.

* * * * *

And eastward, some five thousand miles, in the costly Villa Dainopoulos

on the shores of an ancient sea, Evanthia Solaris pursued the mysterious

yet indomitable course of her destiny. She had arrived back from

"Europe," as has been hinted earlier, in some disarray, alighting from a

crowded train of frowsty refugees, silent, enraged yet reflective after

her odyssey. At her feet followed the young Jew, who incontinently

dropped upon his knees in the road and pressed his lips, in agonized

thankfulness, to his native earth. "_Je déteste les hommes!_" was all

she had said, and Mr. Dainopoulos had spared a moment in the midst of

his many affairs to utter a hoarse croak of laughter. Her story of

Captain Rannie's sudden escape from the problems of living struck him

for a moment, for he had of course utilized his commander's record and

peculiarities in explaining the disappearance of the _Kalkis_. But the

event itself seemed to perplex him not at all. He said, briefly, to his

wife in adequate idiom: "He got a scare. He was afraid of himself. In

wars plenty of men do that. He think and think, and there is nothing.

And that scare a man stiff, when there is nothing." Crude psychology no

doubt, yet adequate to explain Captain Rannie's unsuccessful skirmish

with life.

But Mrs. Dainopoulos was not so callous. She suspected, under Evanthia's

hard exterior, a heart lacerated by the bitterness of disillusion. Who

would have believed, either, that Mr. Spokesly, an Englishman, would

have deserted her like that? Mrs. Dainopoulos was gently annoyed with

Mr. Spokesly. He had not behaved as she had arranged it in her

story-book fashion. Evanthia must stay with them, she said, stroking the

girl's dark head.

As she did. Seemingly she forgot both the base Englishman and the

Alleman Giaour who had so infatuated her. She remained always with the

invalid lady, looking out at the Gulf, watching the transports come and

go. And when at last it came to Mr. Dainopoulos to journey south, when

the sea-lines were once again open and a hundred and one guns announced

the end, she went with them to the fairy villa out at San Stefano that

you reach by the Boulevard Ramleh in Alexandria. It was there that Mr.

Dainopoulos emerged in a new rôle, of the man whose dreams come true.

His rich and sumptuous oriental mind expanded in grandiose visions of

splendour for the being he adored. He built pleasaunces of fine marbles

set in green shrubberies and laved by the blue sea, for her diversion.

He had automobiles, as he had resolved, of matchless black and

cream-coloured coachwork, with scarlet wheels and orange silk

upholstery. He imported a yacht that floated in the harbour like a great

moth with folded wings. Far out on the breakwater he had an enormous

bungalow built of hard woods upon a square lighter, with chambers for

music and slumber in the cool Mediterranean breeze, while the thud and

wash of the waves against the outer wall lulled the sleeper to antique

dreams. He did all this, and sat each day in the portico of the great

marble Bourse, planning fresh acquisitions of money. His wife lay in her

chair in her rose-tinted chamber at San Stefano, looking out upon the

blue sea beyond the orange trees and palms, smiling and sometimes

immobile, as though stunned by this overwhelming onslaught of wealth

pressed from the blood and bones of the youth of the world. She smiled

and lay thinking of her imaginary people, who lived exemplary and

unimportant lives in an England which no longer existed. And near her,

hovering, shining like a creature from another world, clad miraculously

in robes of extraordinary brilliance, could be seen Evanthia Solaris,

the companion of her hours. Often it was she who shot away along the

great corniche road in those cars of speed and beauty, their silver

fittings and glossy panels humming past like some vast and costly

insect. She it was who lay in a silken hammock in the great houseboat by

the breakwater, and listened to the sweet strains from the disc

concealed in a cabinet shaped like a huge bronze shell. "_Je déteste les

hommes_," she murmured to herself as she wandered through the orange

groves to the curved marble seats on the shore.

Hearing these words as she passed, the young Jew, working among the

roses, would tremble and recall with an expression of horror their

experiences in Europe. Often, when in their destitution she had taken

him by the hair and hissed them in his affrighted ear, and he would

utter an almost inaudible moan of "Oh, Madama!" For he loved her. He was

the victim of a passion like a thin, pure, agitated flame burning amid

conflagrations. He would have expired in ecstasy beneath her hand, for

it would have needed more courage to speak than to die. And now he was

in paradise tending the roses and suffering exquisite agonies as she

passed, her beautiful lips muttering, "_Je déteste les hommes!_" As

perhaps she did; yet she would sometimes look suddenly out across the

waves with smouldering amber eyes and parted lips, as though she

expected to behold once more the figure of a man coming up out of the

sea, to offer again the unregarded sacrifices of fidelity and love.

THE END