CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER

By William McFee

Author of "ALIENS", "CASUALS OF THE SEA", "LETTERS FROM AN OCEAN TRAMP," "PORT SAID MISCELLANY"

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920

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

"It is an amiable but disastrous illusion on the part of the western nations that they have created a monopoly in freedom and truth and the right conduct of life."—Mr. Spenlove

TO
PAULINE

CONTENTS

[DEDICATORY]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]

DEDICATORY

There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and say: "There it is!" And together we will slip and stumble and trot down the steep hillside to the level-crossing, and we will run along to the little station, so like ours in America. And when the train is come creaking and groaning and squealing to a standstill, I shall climb in, while you will stand for a moment looking.... You will wave as we start with the usual prodigious jerk, and then you will run back and climb up to the house again, banging the big iron gate securely shut....

All just as before.

But this time there is this difference, that I am not coming back. I am ordered to return to England, and I am to sail to-morrow morning. Now, as I have told you more than once, it is very difficult to know just how anything takes you because you have at your command an alluring immobility, a sort of sudden static receptiveness which is, to an Englishman, a Westerner that is, at once familiar and enigmatic. And when one has informed you, distinctly if ungrammatically, in three languages, that one is going away for good, and you assume for a moment that aforementioned immobility, and murmur "C'est la guerre," I ask you, what is one to think?

And perhaps you will recall that you then went on brushing your hair precisely as though I had made some banal remark about the weather. A detached observer would say—"This woman has no heart. She is too stupid to understand." However, as I am something more than a detached observer, I know that in spite of that gruff, laconic attitude of yours, that enigmatic immobility, you realize what this means to us, to me, to you.

So, while you are down in the garden, and the light is still quite good by this western window, I am writing this for you. As we say over in America, "Let me tell you something." I have written a book, and I am dedicating it to you. As you are aware, I have written books before. When I explained this to you you were stricken with that sudden silence, that attentive seriousness, if you remember, and regarded me for a long time without making any remark. Well, another one is done and I inscribe it to you. Of course I know perfectly well that books are nothing to you, that you read only the perplexing and defaced human hieroglyphics around you. I know that when you receive a copy of this new affair, through the British Post Office in the Rue Franque, you will not read it. You will lay it carefully in a drawer, and let it go at that. And knowing this, and without feeling sad about it, either, since I have no fancy for bookish women, I am anxious that you should read at least the dedication. So I am writing it here by the window, hurriedly, in words you will understand, and I shall leave it on the table, and you will find it later, when I am gone.

Listen.

The fact is, this dedication, like the book which follows after it, is not merely an act of homage. It is a symbol of emancipation from an influence under which I have lived for two thirds of your lifetime. I must tell you that I have always been troubled by visions of beings whom I call dream-women. I was a solitary child. Girls were disconcerting creatures who revealed to me only the unamiable sides of their natures. But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who, while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few traits from the illustrations in books, were none the less extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of myself—what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives regret, I had been born a girl. And later, when I was a youth, and began to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a definite conception. She was everything I disliked—a tiny, slender creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams she was always clinging to me, which I detested. I regarded myself with contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my temperament. You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism would soon fade. On the contrary, she assumed a larger and larger dominion over my imagination. I fancied myself married to her, and for days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill. It was summer time, and I lived on the upper floor of my mother's house in an outlying faubourg of London, from the windows of which one could look across a wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding villas. And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all, that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form....

As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the faubourgs and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power. Beyond the shady drives and prim gardens of the faubourg her image began to waver, and she haunted my dreams no more. And I was glad of this because at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known, rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth. I resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art. I was consumed with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to achieve distinction. And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and ideas, as possible. I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations. But before I was aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman. I saw her in studios, where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye. I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form. I had a notion, too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride, disgust, and fortitude for her to appear in the body. And then things began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity. In the space of a week I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea.

Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost it. Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow. You come of inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and magic casements, is more in your way. But I know without asking that you will be eager to hear about the falling in love. Indeed this is the point of the story.

The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My God! Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen—perhaps it is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion, which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any substitute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell, as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal Love.

Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin, and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense, since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many years from examining her credentials.

That is what it amounted to. For years after I had discovered that she thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued to impose her personality upon me. Whenever I imagined for a moment that I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl's disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile. And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of sacrifice. I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of literature from life. And, moreover, although we are accustomed to assume that all young men have a natural aptitude for love, I think myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond tawdry intrigues and banal courtships, spurious imitations which are exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing. And again, while it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"—the thin book you have so often found by my chair in the garden—that a woman is in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we invest with the vague splendours of our snobbish and inexperienced imagination. A great passion demands as much knowledge and experience and aptitude as a great idea. I would almost say it requires as much talent as a work of art; indeed, the passion, the idea, and the work of art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same emotion. And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written.

And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever encountering passion. Englishwomen especially. They are afraid of it. They think it wicked. So they marry him. Though they suspect that he will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned. Everything is done to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic passion. And the act of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the great adventure of life!

However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting possibilities to pass me without investigating them, I was once more in London, in late autumn. I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic—a species of growth. And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay a reluctance to discover my folly. But convention was too strong for me, and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her. And it was at a picture-show. I remember pondering upon this accident of place as I made my way along Bond Street in the afternoon sunshine, for I could not help thinking of that disdainful dream-woman who posed, in my imagination, as an authority on art. This, I suppose, was due to my prolonged study of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which I had kept my reading for a number of years. I remember giving up my ticket to a sleek-haired, frock-coated individual, and passing along a corridor hung with black velvet, against which were hung one or two large canvases in formidable gold frames, cunningly illuminated by concealed electric globes. A haughty creature stood by a table loaded with catalogues and deigned to accept my shilling. And then, feeling strange and gauche, as is only felt by the sea-farer ashore when he steps out of his authentic milieu, I passed through into the gallery, a high, dignified chamber full of the quiet radiance of beautiful pictures, the life-work of a man whom I had known. I found myself regretting that fate had not permitted me to remain in such an environment; but one cannot avoid one's destiny, and mine is to have an essentially middle-class mind, a bourgeois mentality, which makes it impossible for me to live among artists or people of culture for any length of time. I should say that the reason for this is that such folk are not primarily interested in persons but in types and ideas, whereas I am for persons. Flowers and trees, perfumes and music, colours and children, are to me irrelevant. But every man and woman I meet is to me a fresh problem which engages my emotions. The talk about types is incomprehensible to me, for each fresh individual will throw me into a trance of speculation. But only when one has lived among clever people can one realize how tedious and monotonous their society can be. I was thinking about the man who had painted these pictures and how he had delighted to frighten me with his obscene comments about women, when I saw a woman far down on the left, a woman in an enormous hat, holding extravagant furs about her thin form, and talking to a tall, handsome man from between her small white teeth.

For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her identity. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one—ominous years in a woman's life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.

But it was too late. As we drove in a swiftly moving taxi-cab through the gay streets of West London, and on out to Richmond, where she was staying with friends, I knew that in the end I should be free. She was soon to be married, and in her satirical gray eyes I saw a desire to hold me permanently in a condition of chivalrous abnegation. On these terms I might achieve some sort of destiny without endangering her dominion. But I felt the winds of freedom blowing from the future on my face. I did not see then how it would come about: I did not even imagine the long years of moody and unprofitable voyaging which lay before me. But she saw that her own ideal of masculine modern womanhood no longer appeared to me the supremely evocative thing she claimed it to be, so that in time, in time, her power would depart. I can see her now, turned slightly away from me in the cab, regarding me over her shoulder from beneath that enormous hat, studying even then how she could keep me true to that worn-out creed, weighing who knows what reckless plans in her cool, clever brain....

But it was a long time! For years yet I saw her before me whenever I thought of other women, and her disparaging, slightly satirical smile would interpose itself and hold me back from experimenting with fresh emotions. Even when war came and our spiritual and emotional worlds came crashing about our ears, her power waned but did not depart. I had no choice between this shadowy, reluctant fidelity and a descent into regions where I had neither the means nor the temperament to prosper. And so it went, until suddenly one day the whole thing came to an end. You will remember how I abruptly abandoned the story upon which I was engaged, and told you I had begun upon a tale you had told to me, the tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter? Behold it, transmuted into something you would never recognize, as is the way of stories when a novelist of romantic tendencies gets at them! And what I want you to observe is that the inspiration, as far as I am concerned, was based upon your brief yet intensely vivid projection of your life in that dull street in a Saloniki faubourg, a street so like many of ours in the faubourgs of London, stretching away into dim, dusty distances; but unlike ours in that beyond it rose ranges of hard, sharp mountains that looked as though they had been cut out of pasteboard, and stuck against a sky so unreal in its uncompromising blueness that it seemed to be aniline-dyed. And as the days passed, and the story grew, here by the blue waters of the Gulf I suddenly realized that the spell of the dream-woman had been broken, that behind my story of Captain Macedoine's Daughter another story was working out—the ghost of a story if you like—the drama of the end of an illusion. My old antagonist had met her match at last. She tried to frighten me with her slightly satirical smile. She invoked the innumerable memories and sentiments in which I had been born and reared. But she had met her match. I took her by the arm and opening the door, thrust her gently outside. And then, while you were down there in the garden, I went on to write the tale of Captain Macedoine's Daughter.

There is another long-drawn shriek—the train is leaving the station next to ours—and I take a last look out upon the well-remembered view. Across the shining waters of the Gulf the lights of the city are glittering already against the many-coloured façades, with their marble and cedar balconies, their bright green jalousies and gay ensigns. Already the war-ships in the rade are picked out in bright points, and the mast-head lights are winking rapid messages to each other. The western sky over the headland is a smoky orange with pale green and amber above, and the moon, an incredibly slender crescent of pure silver, hangs faintly over Mount Pagos. It is quite dark down under the cypresses, and a smell of humid earth mingles with the perfume of the jasmine.

Yes, I am now quite ready. No, I have left nothing behind, except perhaps....

Well, it is for you to say.

Bairakli.
W. M.

CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER I

None of the men sitting in deck chairs under the awning were surprised to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H. M. S. Sycorax had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time. This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that to the Chief alone the eastern Mediterranean was a known and experienced cruising ground; and when the Sycorax, detailed to escort convoys through the intricacies of the Ægean Archipelago, awaited her slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi, in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for Rotterdam.

The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of each other's idiosyncrasies—another way of saying the Sycorax was a happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often accumulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.

And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an ambassador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had murmured absently:

"On one occasion, I was an ambassador. I will tell you about it some time."

"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster—Inness was an Oxford man who had married into a wealthy merchant's family. He said "Rotterdam" because he had once been there.

"Yes," said Spenlove. "Rotterdam for Krupp's of Essen. For three years Krupp's took a hundred thousand tons per annum of high-grade ore out of this little island alone. They took it in British bottoms to Rotterdam, and from there it went by way of their interminable canals to Essen. I know because I helped to take it. It was just about the time, too, that Chamberlain was preaching his crusade against the evils of Germany dumping her steel below cost price on our markets, and I was so indignant about it that I wrote to the newspapers. I often wrote to the newspapers in those days. I suppose we all catch the disease at some time or other. As a rule, of course, nothing happened save that the letter would not be printed, or else printed full of mistakes, with the vital paragraphs omitted for 'lack of space.' This letter wasn't printed either, but I received one in return from a fiery young member of Parliament who had just been returned on the Protective Tariff ticket. He asked for full details, which I sent to him. I believe he tried to make a question of it in the House, but he ran up against the Consular Service, and that did for him. You see, our Consul here was named Grünbaum.

"More than that," went on Mr. Spenlove, sitting upright in his deck-chair and looking attentively at a near-by ventilator; "more than that, Mr. Grünbaum was resident concessionaire of the mining company, he owned the pumping-plant which irrigates yonder valley, he was connected by marriage with the Greek governor of the Island, who lives over in the tiny capital of Ipsilon, and he, Grünbaum, was the richest man in the Cyclades. That was his house, that big square white barn with the three tall windows and the outside staircase. He was a man of enormous size and weight, and I daresay the people of the Island thought him a god. He certainly treated them most humanely. Every widow was pensioned by him, which was not very much after all, for they used to have precious little use for money. You could get a bottle of wine and a great basket of grapes and figs for a piece of soap, I remember. He built churches for them, too, like that one perched up there on the rock above his house—snow-white with a blue dome. You may have noticed the other day in the wireless news that the friends of freedom in Greece polished off a few of what were described as reactionaires. Put them up against a wall and pumped mannlicher bullets into them. One of these obstacles to liberty was named Grünbaum, I observed.

"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in Grünbaum's employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain Macedoine. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a very remarkable man for all that. He wasn't a captain at all, really, you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back, when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, passengers, and fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money. He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn, clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed passengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, 'Oh, Captain, can we ...' something or other. The skipper was a dried-up little shell-back who hated passengers and never came down on the promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in buttons, who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. 'Captain Macedoine.' When he gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical Louisiana nigger, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: 'All right, sah, Captain Macedoine!' It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England, 'retired on a competency,' as he phrased it, he retired as Captain Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.

"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laugh; but you have not been to sea as long as I have. Such things are possible at sea. I have had a second engineer from Sunderland, a chap named Philip, who claimed Philip of Spain as his ancestor. There was Captain Gizzard, in my old London employ, who had a genealogical tree which traced the old fraud's descent from the Guiscards of Sicily. No! Captain Macedoine's illusions are common enough, I fancy, among men. It was only that instead of trying to master them and clear them away, he cultivated them until they grew to monstrous proportions and he lost sight of reality altogether. Or if you like, he was an artist, working upon himself as material, like those old masters we read about who devoted their lives to the accomplishment of obscure technical excellences that only the cognoscenti could discover and enjoy."

"Possibly," murmured the Surgeon, smiling in the darkness of the evening.

"Well," said Mr. Spenlove, in a musing tone, "of course a certain latitude of analogy is permitted in describing one man to another, if we ever can describe him. That was how Macedoine struck me. The aim of his art was to conceal the artist, which I understand is sound aesthetics. And it was impossible not to admire his method, his style, if you like. There was nothing crude in it. So far from leaving nothing to chance, he left everything to chance. Take the case of his daughter. The brat in those days was a god-send to him. I used to think she was merely an invention, he was so circumstantial in his subtly shaded allusions. You might say that if she hadn't existed, the trend of his emotional development, the scheme on which he was engaged, would have compelled him to invent her. As I say, I did believe at one time he had invented her, for he was always inventing something. In some bewildering, indefinable way, we became aware, week by week, month by month, of a fresh touch, a new phase of Captain Macedoine. I don't pretend to know what final frame he proposed to give to the magnificent picture he was making. Perhaps he didn't know himself. Perhaps he had no ultimate design. Anyhow we never had it, for as I said, the company was absorbed and we all had to come home.

"I admit I was surprised enough when I found out, quite accidentally, that he had married an octaroon. When I say married, I mean of course, as far as fidelity and maintenance was concerned. He rented a cottage out on Tchoupitoulas Street, where the mosquitoes sing loud enough to drown conversation, and the grass grows man-high between the road and the sidewalk. And there the woman lived a while and died. I was never in the house, but young Strellett, the second steward, who was lost when the Toro turned over in the Yucatan channel, was married and lived not far from Macedoine's ménage, and I can imagine the place. Strellett had a little three-roomed box where he lived with his big rosy-cheeked Irish wife, and there was something very homelike about it, for all the carpets and curtains and a good deal of the table-linen had come from the Maracaibo Line's cabins. Sent ashore to be cleaned, you know, and didn't get back. I dare say Macedoine's place was even more completely furnished at the company's expense. They all did it. Perhaps that was one of the reasons we all had to come home. That was ... yes, more than twenty years ago.

"I'm afraid, though, there were not many of us like Macedoine. We didn't come home to retire on a competency. New Orleans used to be what they called 'a wide-open little town' and there were plenty of ways of getting rid of our wages, good as they were. However, that's a detail. We came home, except one or two youngsters who struck west and got into Nevada mining plants or San Francisco lumber ships. I was glad to come. I had a few shots in the locker and I went down into Hampshire to see my people. I didn't stay as long as I intended. Who of us ever does? After the first glow of welcome dies away, we have to depend on our personal attractions to keep people interested. We may keep the ball rolling a little longer if we get married or even engaged; but it is a sorry business after all. You fellows are for ever wanting the ship to go home. Well, you wait and see. You'll be glad to be back. When a man has got the sea-habit, his relations always regard him as a bit of a nuisance.

"I went to sea again. I joined a London Company which I always call now 'my old company' because I was so long with them, and have for them a peculiar sort of cantankerous affection. They paid infernally poor wages, they were always in a hole financially until the war made them multi-millionaires, and their accommodation was pretty poor. But for some reason or other men stayed with them. I believe it was because we were working for a private firm and not for one of those gigantic corporations without soul to be damned or body to be kicked, as the saying is. The firm were real people to us. They came down to see the ship in London River. Old Gannet—it was Gannet, Prawle and Co.—used to leave a ten-pound note on the Chief's wash-stand after he'd had a yarn and a cigar. Young Gannet, home for the holidays from Winchester College, would come down to St. Katherine's Dock and make himself squiffy with Madeira the skipper had brought home from the Islands. Prawle had been an office boy when old Gannet was young, and had worked up to a partnership and married Daisy Gannet. Smartest man on the Baltic Exchange, they used to say. Yes, their ships were fierce, but men stayed in them. Even now, with old Gannet dead and Prawle retired, and the management paying poor whiskey-soaked young Gannet three thousand a year to keep out of the office, the old skippers and chiefs are still ploughing the ocean for them. You see, we know their ways.

"I went to sea, and kept on at it. You might say it was force of habit, for I must admit I could have had jobs ashore in those days. Not now. But then I could. But it grows on one, going to sea. And I was making friends. There's nothing like a ship-mate who is a friend. The mere fact of you or him joining another ship and sailing away is nothing. When you meet again you take up the tale where you dropped it, years before, half the world away. But you must be young. It is impossible to weld friendships when the heat of youth has gone out. Interests, family ties, danger, sorrow, all may do something, but only when you are young can you make the friendships that nothing can destroy."

Mr. Spenlove paused, and for a moment there was no sound save the purr of the dynamos under their feet, the soft swish and suck of the waves flowing in and out of the under-cut marble cliffs, and the steady tramp of the Quartermaster patrolling to and fro at the gangway. One of the noticeable points about Spenlove was that he fitted into no standard gauge. Neither the Surgeon nor the Oxonian could "place" him precisely, they would confess. Nor could the more experienced lieutenants, highly certificated gentlemen from the Liverpool to New York Ferry steamers. With unconscious humour they "wondered such a man should go to sea." The notion that the sea should be peopled exclusively with moral and intellectual derelicts dies hard. The fact was, Mr. Spenlove was a connoisseur of humanity. He seemed to have met so many types that he unconsciously addressed himself to the fundamentals. He took the inevitable superficial features of one's character for granted. This made him easy to accept but difficult to understand. And so, when he spoke of friendship and youth, the other men did not laugh. They were silent—some with assent, some with doubt, and some, possibly, with regret.

"I was second of one of their oldest boats for two years and Jack Evans was mate. Jack and I became friends. I don't mean that the Mate and the Second of that old ship went about with their arms wound round each other's necks. We were, on the contrary, very often at each other's throats, so to speak. Mates and second-engineers are professionally antagonistic. We had terrific altercations over stores, for the company patronized one of those old-fashioned ship chandlers who sent cabin, deck, and engine stores all in one chaotic heap. Jack would get my varnish and I would snaffle a couple of bolts of his canvas. But that would all blow away by tea time, when we'd go ashore and spend the evening together. Mind you, we were neither of us very good young men. We ... well, we had some good times and some bad ones. We were shifted together into another ship. Then Jack, who'd been nine solid years mate in the company and was getting so angry about it that the port-captain used to avoid him, Jack got a command. I shall never forget it. We were lying as peaceably as you please in the top corner of the old Queens Dock, Glasgow. It was Saturday night and all was snug for a quiet week-end. Jack and I were in his room under the bridge having a nip, when a telegraph-boy came clattering down the brass-edged staircase. Jack opened the wire, read it, and then gave me a thump on the back that nearly broke it. He was a stout, florid-faced, peppery little Welshman. What I liked about him was his crystal-clear character. What he thought came out like a shell out of a gun—with an explosion. 'The old thief's given me a ship at last!' he roared. And he had to pack and get away that night to Bristol. I went for a cab while he got his dunnage together. And I remember now, waiting on the platform at the Union Station for the train to move, with Jack in a corner of the compartment drunk as a lord, and snoring.

"It was in London I met him again. We had had a collision and I was one of the witnesses called by the company to swear our ship was innocent. She wasn't: she wasn't: she did everything she shouldn't have done—but no matter. We all stayed at a little hotel in the Strand, getting a guinea a day expenses, and we all swore black was white, and the owners, our owners, lost the case. They had already lost the ship, so we were told to go home and wait a few weeks until they could get hold of another one cheap. Of course most of the crowd joined other companies, but I went off to Waterloo to inflict myself on my people in Hampshire again. And it was at the bookstall that I saw Jack staring at the illustrated papers and jangling the money in his pockets. He was in a very shabby condition, I may tell you. His chin was a rich growth of black stubble, his round protuberant brown eyes were blood-shot, and his clothes had been slept in, I'm sure. 'Thank God it's you, Fred,' he splutters out, for he jumped like a cat when I touched him. We went into the bar and he told me how he had fallen on such evil days. His ship had been away nearly a year on the west coast of South America. He hadn't spent a pound in the whole trip. No going ashore, nobody to speak to, nothing. And here he'd come into London River and paid off. It was easy to see what had happened. A young hot-blooded man with three or four hundred pounds in his pocket, and no decent friends in town. His contempt for himself was rather amusing. 'Take me away, Fred,' he implored. 'Take me somewhere where I shan't be tempted.'

"'The fact is,' I said, as we made for the barber shop, 'you ought to get married, Jack.'

"'Who'd have a drunken old swab like me?' he inquired, sadly. 'You know I've been brought up common.'

"He was very contrite, but eventually, when he had got himself spruced up, changed his clothes and fetched his dunnage out of the terrible little hotel near Waterloo station where he had been lured, he began to take a less austere view of himself. He was determined, however, never to wallow in the mire again. He was a ship-master. His plump, rosy face grew pale and drawn at the possibilities which he had risked. He was a typical British sailor man. Riotous living was really distasteful to him, but he had no idea of getting rid of his money in any other way. However, I missed that train and took him down with me to Hampshire next day. It was one of the great deeds of my career. He fell in love the very first week."

"But what has all this to do with Captain Macedoine and this Island of Ipsilon?" enquired the small, precise voice of the Paymaster.

For a moment there was no reply. It was very dark under the awning now, for the moon was still behind the cliffs. Four bells rang at the gangway. Mr. Spenlove lit a cigarette and continued.

"Have you ever seen a sea-captain in the throes of adoration? It is an astonishing sight. Jack was what he himself called 'open as the day.' Mind you, I had no ulterior motive in taking my old friend down home with me. I had no plain sisters or cousins to get settled in life. Both plain and pretty in our family were married and gone when we arrived. We lived, you know, just outside Threxford, a small town six miles from a railway, tucked away in the valley of the Threxe, about ten miles from where that small stream falls into the Channel. It was a lovely spot, but so dreadfully quiet I could never live there very long. Over the town hung a high hill crowned by the workhouse. You see, it was the workhouse master's daughter Jack had fallen in love with."

"Captain Macedoine's daughter?" suggested the Paymaster.

"No, a very different person, I assure you. Madeline Hanson had been brought up in a very secluded way. It couldn't have been otherwise. Old Hanson occupied a somewhat dubious position in the social life of England. A workhouse master is not the sort of man either rich or poor want to have much to do with. He is like the hangman or jailer or rag-and-bone man; a necessary evil. But he may be, as Hanson was, a most respectable person. And Madeline, his only child, was brought up in almost solitary confinement until she was twenty. I believe she went to an aunt in Portsmouth occasionally. Anyhow it suited her. She was a puny, flat-chested little girl, very prim and precise, and would bridle at once when any one laughed or made a joke. I never discovered exactly how Jack got acquainted with her. At church most likely, for he was in full cry after respectability and went to church regularly with my old people. I know we used to go fishing together at first, and later I found myself going alone, for Jack was meeting his inamorata, and going for walks. Oh, quite above board. Jack was 'open as the day.' He lost no time in marching up the hill to the workhouse (not the first time he'd been inside one, he assured me grimly) and informing Mr. Hanson that Captain Evans wished to pay attention to Miss Hanson. Whether old Hanson was a man of the world or not, I cannot say, but he certainly knew his daughter might go a long way farther and fare worse. Jack's affair prospered. I have often been curious to know just what they said to each other as they prowled about the lanes in the dark. I suppose it was a case of the attraction of opposites. For once, anyhow, in spite of novelists, the course of true love ran smooth.

"Of course Jack had his fits of jealousy. You see, he couldn't understand how in the world he had managed to pick such a prize without having to shoot up the whole town. He even suspected me of having designs on his happiness, and I suddenly realized the tremendous difficulty of reassuring him. You know, it's a delicate business, disclaiming all desire for a woman. If you overdo it, you rouse suspicion at once. When I said, 'Oh, no, I don't want to....' Jack was up and prancing about the room. 'Why, do you know anything?' he demanded. I soothed him, telling him he knew I wasn't a marrying man. 'That be d—d for a tale. I wasn't either till I met Madeline.' I had a stormy time. The contrast between Jack's volcanic temperament and the calm, meticulous flow of his courtship was comic. I was thankful when he was finally married and gone to Ilfrocombe for his highly respectable honeymoon. And then, a fortnight later, I got a telegram ordering me to join his ship, the Manola, at Newcastle, as chief. We were shipmates once more.

"There now began for me an existence which is rather difficult to describe. In cargo-boats, as no doubt you know, the skipper and chief can easily be thrown together a good deal. Jack and I of course were. But Jack was under the impression that I existed for the sole purpose of listening to his rapturous idolizing of his darling wife. He wrote to her every day, and read the letter to me afterward. She wrote to him every day, and when we reached port and the mail came aboard, Jack would read the gist of it to me. It was like being married oneself. He would lie back in his deck chair on the bridge on fine evenings in the Mediterranean and suck at his cigar, sunk in thought. And then suddenly he would bring out some profoundly novel and original remark about Madeline. I had Madeline for breakfast, dinner, supper, and between meals. It was trying, but it was nothing compared with the frightful time I put in with him the voyage the baby was born. We were in Genoa, and he wired home every day. I would march him up town in the evening and stand him drinks, which he swallowed without looking at them. And it never entered his head that it was possibly less important to me than to him. When a telegram came, 'Daughter, both doing well,' he ordered grog for all hands, took me up town, and stood champagne to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the Verdi Bar. I got him down to the harbour in a carriage and he wanted to fight me because I laughed when he told the driver that he was going to call the baby Angelina Madeline Evans.

"He did, too. Life for me became impregnated with Madeline and Angelina as with a domestic odour. That marvellous child haunted my hours of leisure long before I had ever seen her. As the months and years passed, and Jack and I fared up and down the world together, I sometimes wondered whether we hadn't both married Madeline. Jack was a model husband. The notion that any other woman existed, or that any other man could love a woman as he loved Madeline, never entered his head. He was perfectly satisfied as long as one sat and listened to him talking about Madeline. I believe he would have urged me to go and do likewise, if he hadn't been convinced that no more Madelines were available. I believe, too, he thought me a bit of an ass to take him down and introduce him instead of marrying her myself. But as you will see, she and I were not affinities.

"So life went on, and now I am coming to the time when Captain Macedoine's daughter comes into the thing. Oh, no, I haven't forgotten what I was talking about. Time passed, and one voyage we left home with Jack in an anxious frame of mind. The child was about five years old then and she was sick. Something the matter with her throat. Jack was like a caged bear when we got to sea. There was no wireless then, you know. You would have thought there had never been a sick child on earth before. 'Fred,' he would say, 'I left orders—get the best advice, best of everything. I don't give a damn what it costs,' And he'd prance to and fro. He never looked at the ship. If we dropped a knot below our customary two hundred a day, he'd be in my room growling, 'Aren't we ever goin' to get to Alexandria, Fred?' When we did get there he fled up to the post office to get his mail—forgot all about ours of course. 'Not yet out of danger—diphtheria,' so ran the telegram in reply to his own frantic message. I never had such a time in my life. He was like a man demented. He would catch me by the shoulder and coat-collar and glare at me out of his bulging, blood-shot brown eyes, his fat cheeks all drawn into pouches, and stutter, 'Fred, this is the end o' me. If I lose one I lose both. My God, I've a good mind to go home. I tell you I'm going off my head. If I lose one I lose both. Madeline'll never live through the loss o' the child. What shall I do, oh, what shall I do?' I believe he used to go into his cabin, shut the door, and pester the Almighty with his petitions. You know, they say domestic ties strengthen a man's personality, stimulate him to ambition. I have not noticed it. On the contrary, it has often seemed to me that married men adopt the ethics of the jungle. Life for them is a case of the man and his mate against the world. The jungle reverberates with their cries of rage, jealousy, and amorous delight. What are literature and drama but the coördination of these elevated cat-calls?"

"Oh, come!" murmured the Surgeon.

"Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular? Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you, something had to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the halls:

"What more can you want when you've got your wife and kids,
And a nice little home of your own?

"That was rapidly becoming the sum total of England's morality. All men were 'men without a country' and they didn't much care even if they were citizens of a mean city, so long as their own contemptible little hutch was secure. I rather think the war has dealt that doctrine an ugly blow."

"Well, go on," said somebody.

"You must remember that Jack and his Madeline didn't simply look down on the rest of the world as sordid worms who couldn't appreciate such a holy passion. They didn't think of us at all. We didn't exist. Nothing existed—for them—outside that microscopic domestic circle. Madeline had been brought up to be refined, reserved, 'not like other girls.' She silently and unconsciously laid down a narrow-gauge line along which she and Jack were to advance through life, and Jack, who was one of those men who are very much what their wives make them, was only too glad to get his orders. And he, with the intuition of despair, knowing her to be besotted with pride in their child almost beyond endurance, gobbled hoarsely in my ear in the night watches that if one died the other would follow, and leave him desolate.

"Well, the child didn't die. I have sometimes wondered whether it was anything more than a sore throat. It doesn't matter. When we came home, Angelina was on the mend, and the cable companies must have noticed a falling off in their receipts. I was relieved. I mean in mind. Jack tore off home for a night to see for himself. He told me afterward 'he nearly cracked Madeline's ribs,' he was so glad to see her. Mind, he'd only been away six weeks! Think of it, in the light of the recent years. Not that I believed him. Women like Mrs. Evans don't get their ribs cracked. No matter. My relief was speedily changed to grave apprehension when he came back to the ship accompanied by wife, child, and a nurse, and announced that he had obtained permission to take them a voyage. It was one of the unusual points of old Gannet's employ—he allowed each skipper and chief to take their wives one voyage per year. I had been through it before, and disliked the prospect. I have sometimes wondered whether old Gannet had a secret and sinister intention, for it is a fact that you can't honestly say you know a woman until you have been to sea with her. No woman looks her best, either physically or mentally, at sea. Oh, of course if you are married to her as well, the case is different. I offer no opinion. But I know of one young man at least who broke it off after enduring a voyage with a hen-pecked captain.

"I misjudged Jack, however. Jack was his wife's slave, but he remained in command of his ship. You see he also had been at sea with skippers' wives in the past. 'One word, Madeline, and home you go,' came up the ventilator as I was sitting on the bridge after tea. I was astounded. It was a new Jack, or rather, the old fiery, original Jack. The next sentence, in reply to some inaudible remark of Madeline's, explained what I had thought was a quarrel. 'Well, we must have an understanding before we sail. I know what I'm talking about, dear. I've been Mate many a year and I never would stand the Skipper's missus interfering with the ship's discipline.'

"I was admiring Jack for this sagacious warning when there came a squawl from his bathroom, where the nurse-girl was washing Angelina. Mrs. Evans rustled across, crying out instructions concerning Babs, as they called the youngster. And then came Jack's voice exploding in amazement. 'What's that gel's name, Madeline? What'd you call her?' And a voice as clear, as soft and as pure as a silver bell answered:

"'Artemisia Macedoine, Captain. That's my name.'"

CHAPTER II

And though things do happen like that sometimes, as I sat in my chair, quite innocently alongside the Captain's ventilator, and sucked at my cigar, I was taken aback. It was like a voice coming up from the tomb—the tomb of a buried past. In a way it was a relief, for I was becoming so involved in Jack's domestic life that I was losing touch with the outside world altogether. The sound of that name recalled to me my old, unregenerate, wandering self. I had not forgotten him. One never forgets a master of illusion, such as he surely was. But the very existence of so imaginative a man seemed doubtful in the company of matter-of-fact, open-minded, good old honest Jack. Jack's lack of the power of dissembling and allusion was devastating. He had no more nuance, as the French say, than a fog-horn. Think of a man who could say to the wife of his bosom, the goddess before whom he worshipped with preposterous self-abasement—'One word, and home you go!' Jack would have had one word for Macedoine and one only—Faker. But I have found, in the course of my rolling existence, that fakers are often more interesting, intrinsically, than careful, honest men.

"And I had heard, in a round-about way, some years before, that Captain Macedoine had not only been an illustrious faker but a fairly competent swindler as well. We were discharging machinery and stores at Cristobal, when a young chap who'd been Junior Fourth in the old Maracaibo Line came aboard and had a chat. He was one of those who hadn't gone home. Indeed, he was able to take out his final papers—never mind how—as soon as he was paid off, and being a decent young chap, fairly clever and a good mixer, he had soon gotten a billet in the Canal Zone. For some reason or other he had liked me when we were shipmates. I remembered him as having no aptitude for the sea. He had a sweet-heart in England he was always talking about, but he married in the States, of course. Well, young Cotter, with his little waxed moustache and his superior bank clerk's manner, walked aboard, shook me warmly by the hand, and gave me an immense quantity of miscellaneous news. What with the Yucatan ships calling three or four times a week, Cotter was up to date with everything happening from Galveston to Biloxi and from Tampa to Boston. Did I remember So-and-so—chap with a squint, or a mole, or a broken finger, as the case might be. Cotter always emphasized a man's physical defects in alluding to him. And so the talk came round to 'Oh, did I remember that chap with the solemn face and the big stomach? Captain Macedoine we used to call him? Why, didn't you hear? Extradition order. Yes! The cunning old guy had a dozen opium dives off Rampart Street in full swing. Must have been coining money. No, they never got him. He had left England by that time. Nobody knows where he is now, I suppose. Smart, eh?' Such was Captain Macedoine to me as I sat listening to the good Jack sputtering in his cabin:

"'Great Christopher! And who in thunder gave you a name like that. What is it, again?' And then Mrs. Evans interposing with 'That will do, dear. She can't help her name.'

"'A h—l of a name for a servant,' muttered Jack.

"Well, poor Jack found that taking his family to sea was a more formidable affair than he had imagined. The fact was, Jack, although he had been married six years, knew no more about married life than a bachelor. He hadn't spent more than a week at one time alongside of his wife. Many sea-faring men are like this. The very routine of ordinary household existence is novel to them. They live voyage after voyage at sea, dreaming of an impossibly perfect existence ashore, and their brief holidays, in their wives' houses only confirm them in the delusion that shore life is heaven, and life on board ship hell. Whereas, you know, it is really the other way round."

"Oh, I say!" said Inness, who, in spite of Oxford, retained his illusions.

"What rot, Spenlove!" said the First Lieutenant, a gentleman still unmarried, but rigidly engaged.

"Ah, but you forget," retorted Mr. Spenlove, laughing softly as he gazed up at the moon now high over the cliff. He looked very like a benevolent satyr as he sat leaning forward in his chair, his chin on his hands, his trim gray beard pushed out, and his curiously slanted black eyebrows raised—"You forget that I am dealing with basic realities. You forget that ninety-nine sailor-men out of each hundred feed themselves exclusively on dreams. You are like the donkey who imagines he sees a resplendent carrot hung in front of him. It is not only that he never gets the carrot. There never was any carrot for him to get. I repeat—dear old Jack Evans was not a bit singular in his illusions, any more than Captain Macedoine was in his. They believed in them a bit longer than you young fellows do nowadays, that's all."

"Well, go on," suggested the Doctor, and moved out of the moonlight into the shadow, so that Mr. Spenlove remained alone and appeared to be talking to himself.

"Of course, so far, I hadn't seen any of the party save Jack. I'd been ashore when they arrived—did I say we were in Middlesborough-on-Tees?—for I had friends at Stockton. I was really concerned, for knowing what a headlong, forthright fool Jack was, I expected to do or say something that might spoil his life's happiness. And here he was complicating matters ten-fold by bringing a nurse-girl, a 'governess.' And while I sat there pondering upon the possibilities, the Mate came up with an expression of immense cunning on his face, his hand funnelled round his mouth, and whispered 'Seen 'em, Mister?'

"I shook my head. Mr. Bloom, Basil Bloom, had been only a couple of trips with us, and I knew Jack had very little use for him. Mr. Bloom, indeed, was one of those extraordinary men who go to sea year after year, and not only do they never seem to attain to any decent mastery of their profession, but in their speech and manner and appearance they resemble piano-tuners or billiard-markers more than sailors. Bloom had a moustache like an Italian hair-dresser's, immense, fine, full, and silky, with moist red lips eternally parting and showing a set of perfect false teeth. His papers were miracles of eulogy, his discharges, save that he had been in a good many ships, without blemish. And yet from the moment he had come jauntily on board the previous voyage, Jack had been straining like a terrier on the leash. Mr. Bloom seemed to do nothing right. It had been my lot to hear both sides of the question. Jack, over a whiskey-and-soda in my room, would bewail his fate at having an agricultural labourer sent him as chief officer; and next day, Mr. Bloom, bringing me the position and distance run, would twirl his moustache and allude to the amazingly incompetent persons who secured commands nowadays. Of course I sided with Jack. Mr. Bloom was nothing to me. He was the sort of man I would much rather hit in the face than shake hands with. The man didn't look like a sailor. He had no sea-going gear. Jack nearly had a seizure on my settee when he told me the new Mate was patrolling the bridge in red silk socks, patent-leather dress-pumps, and an old Norfolk jacket. When we began to roll off Ushant and ship a few seas, it appeared Mr. Bloom had neither oilskins nor sea-boots. To see him skipping along through green sea water in his dress-pumps, to look at the patent log, was a revelation of human improvidence. Here was a man the wrong side of forty, and he hadn't the sense to bring suitable clothing to sea with him! At the table he bewildered, angered, and contradicted poor old Jack with political argument. Once, after getting his anchors fouled, and firing his clutch-blocks, and otherwise making a mess of things on the forecastle-head, he had the temerity to tell Jack that 'every ship-master ought to have tariff-reform at his finger-ends.' Jack nearly had apoplexy. He managed to sputter out that 'every mate ought to have his job at his finger-ends, or else go home and buy a farm.' Mr. Bloom, holding his fine military figure erect and delicately preening his moustache, told me afterward 'That's the worst of these young ship-masters—they think insults are arguments.'

"Now I saw trouble ahead for Jack with Mr. Bloom on board. I don't pretend to have a very profound insight into human character, but I had an indefinable conviction that Mrs. Evans would look favourably upon Mr. Basil Bloom. Oh, no, I don't mean that my prurient mind was gloating over the destruction of Jack's marital bliss. Not at all. I never liked Madeline, but I do her the justice of proclaiming her inviolable chastity. What I mean is, I felt that she had more in common intellectually with Mr. Bloom than with us. He had a good deal of the fussiness of middle-aged shore-people, clearing his throat, coughing behind his hand, saying 'excuse me,' smoothing his hair with his palm, and referring to things he had seen 'in the papers.' And in spite of his inadequate sea-going gear, he invariably appeared in a more or less clean stiff collar. A woman, I mean a genteel woman, will never utterly condemn any man so long as he wears a collar. This would not have mattered save that Jack and I invariably abandoned collars as soon as the pilot had left.

"So, when Mr. Basil Bloom, in a dirty gray lounge suit, brown Oxford shoes, a grimy collar, and a deer-stalker hat, bent over me and enquired if I had seen the arrivals, I shook my head and got up to walk away. But Mr. Bloom detained me. Had I not seen the nurse? Nice little piece of goods. And the baby was a little angel. Between me and him, he was good enough to say, we ought to have a very pleasant trip, what with ladies on board, what? And Mr. Bloom, settling his dirty collar and concealing a brilliant smile behind a hairy, ringed hand, walked off to superintend his neglected work.

"I was not such a fool as to assume that I could any longer stroll into Jack's room and have a chat. I am not afraid of women, but I regard their lairs with considerable trepidation. On board an old tramp steamer a woman is nothing less than a scourge. There is no place for her, and consequently you never know where you may find her. If you walk to and fro on the deck, you are probably keeping her awake. If you go out on deck in your shirt-sleeves, or come from a bath with a towel round you, you are outraging her modesty. If you use the ordinary jargon of the sea, she writes home that the engineers are awfully coarse on her husband's ship. You moon about in a furtive fashion, closing doors and ventilators when you converse with one another, and pray for the day when she will quit the ship and return to the semi-detached mansion in the suburbs where she reigns as queen, Captain So-and-So's wife. I felt sadly, as I sat in my room, that my friendship with Jack would remain for a few weeks in a state of suspended animation. I got up several times, unconsciously, to go along, and had to sit down again. And as I sat there, the alleyway was darkened and the familiar stout figure and short red neck appeared. I had a little table in my room and as a rule sat behind it on the settee, while Jack sprawled in an old easy chair I had bought in Savannah, a chair out of an old plantation mansion. Jack sank into it and remained silent while I poured out two pegs and squirted some soda-water into them. I knew perfectly well, or thought I did, that he needed some restorative after his recent adventures. He drank it thirstily and set the glass on the table.

"'Fred,' he said, in the cautious whisper which, as I have said, becomes second nature when there is a woman on board, 'Fred, I've made an infernal fool of meself. They've let me in at the office.'

"'Why,' I said, 'I thought they did you rather well, giving you permission to take Mrs. Evans and the youngster. You know how they wired Tompkins once: 'No children'?'

"'You don't know nothing about it,' says Jack, who was invariably hard on English when he was moved. 'It's a case of wheels within wheels. They only did that to get this gel out for nothing. She's going out to her father in the Grecian Arches, and some clever fool in the office thought of sending her down to Mrs. Evans to see if she'd do to look after the kid.'

"'Well, it's only her grub for a fortnight or so,' I remarked.

"Jack looked solemnly at me and shook his head.

"'Have you seen her?'

"'No,' I said, 'Mr. Bloom told me she was a nice little piece of goods.' Jack snorted.

"'He's down in the cabin now talking about what's on at the theatres. Fred, I'm in for trouble, and you'll have to stand by me.'

"And he was, for you must bear in mind that there were others on board besides Mr. Bloom. There was the Second Mate, a young man whose prospects were tarnished by a weakness for secret drinking. And there was young Siddons, a stripling just out of his apprenticeship and uncertificated, the son of a well-to-do merchant in a country town. Jack used to say there was too much of the lah-di-dah about him, and was down on him time and again. All the same he liked the boy, as I did, too, for Siddons was a gentleman—the only one on board, I used to think. He got the D. S. O. the other day for bombing something or other in Germany. He was what modern, educated smart women call 'a charming boy' or 'a pretty little boy.' Not that he was effeminate, by any means. He was simply one of those to whom virtuous sentiment is a passionate necessity. Instead of playing in the gutters of life, as so many of us do, his young body and soul were on tip-toe for the coming of love. You can see it when they are like that. There is a thirsty look about the lips, a turn for moodiness, a sudden dilation of the pupils as they catch your glance, and a quick flush, very pretty to see. And sometimes, I am informed, they find a woman worthy of the gifts they bear....

"We had a couple of engineers, too, but they were scarcely to be classed with young Siddons. They were like a good many of us, useful, shop-soiled articles with plenty of the meretricious conventional sexuality which passes for passion when stimulated. But neither of them would have got a look from a modern, educated smart woman. The Third I didn't know very much about. He came and went, and the principal impression I have of him now is that he was married. The Second had what I should call an oppressively incondite mind. He had a cold avidity for facts. Unlike most seamen he never read fiction unless it was some book which had achieved notoriety for what is called frankness. He had a bookshelf in his cabin containing his shore-going boots and a derby hat, a Whittaker's Almanac, a Who's Who, several year-books, and a shilling encyclopedia. It was astonishing, the comfort he seemed to derive from knowing the census-returns of Bolivia, or the Republican majority in Oregon, or the number of microbes in a pint of milk. But it did no one any harm. I only mention it because he, too, in his way, fell in love with Artemisia and for a time neglected his familiar preoccupations.

"For that is what it amounted to—that we all fell in love. Each of us had to measure ourselves by this standard. At certain times in our lives we all have to drop what we are doing and submit ourselves to the test. I'm afraid most of us don't cut a very brilliant figure. It is fortunate for us that one can achieve success in a lower class, and can pass muster as human beings because we are honest or sober or clever, and not simply because we are worthy of love. All the same, I fancy the contempt which some of us pour upon the lucky ones is born of envy. We wish to be like them in our heart of hearts. I used to have the most preposterous dreams of being the lover of some proud, beautiful girl I had read about or seen in the street.

"Artemisia was like that. She was one of those beings who inspire love, who are the living embodiments of that tender philosophy which makes every adjustment of our lives by sentiment alone, and who convince us, by a gesture, a glance, a timbre in their voices, that our lightest fancy is a grave resolution of the soul.

"It would be easy, of course, to jeer at a crowd of simple, half-educated shell-backs losing their hearts to a lady-passenger's maid, but that would not be a fair account of it. We were not simple in that sense. My experience is that contact with the great elemental realities does not breed simplicity so much as a sort of cunning. We live deprived of so many of the amenities of culture and wealth that we cannot credit our good fortune when anything really fine comes in our way. We are not to be had. We are cautious. These good things are for shore people. And we get into the habit of good-humoured humility, discounting ourselves and our shipmates beyond recall. We say, 'only fools and drunkards go to sea,' and that indicates pretty accurately the value we place upon our hopes and aspirations.

"And so you must not expect me to give you vivid accounts of passionate declarations of love under the Mediterranean moon, or of desperate knife-work in the dark with Artemisia bending over the dying man and kissing his death-dewed forehead in a last farewell. The voyage went on much as usual outwardly. The days are gone, if they ever existed, when love ruled the camp or the quarter deck. Yet there was a subtle change. Men went about their various tasks with an air of charged expectancy. Now and again a couple could be seen talking earnestly together. The weather, until we passed Gibraltar, was against any dramatic developments. Mrs. Evans and Angelina kept below. Only once, at dusk, while we were passing the Burlings, off Portugal, I looked over the rail of the bridge-deck and saw young Siddons leaning on the bulwarks below, his head turned toward someone I could not see. He was laughing as happily as a child. Leaning over a little further I saw a girl's finely articulated hand and a corner of a white apron.

"But most of us had no chance. It sounds a strange thing to say, but it was almost as if Mrs. Evans herself regarded me as married to her. As though because I had been the means of their meeting, I was entitled to a sort of founder's share in Angelina! I was in the way to becoming an expert in infant's complaints. And Jack seemed to think that when I came into the cabin to talk, he had the right of going off duty, so to speak, and would go up to the chart room to have a smoke. No, I didn't go simply to catch a glimpse of Artemisia, though she was worth glimpsing. I went from a sense of social duty. I felt I owed it to Jack to be sociable with his wife. And perhaps, too, there was an idea at the back of my head that contact with Mrs. Evans was a corrective to any tendency I might have to make a fool of myself over any young woman. That was Mrs. Evans' specialty, you might say. She didn't mean it, but unconsciously she shrivelled at the least breath of desire. I used to watch apprehensively for the blank look in the eyes, the tightening of the lips, the infinitesimal drawing back of the head, as of a snake about to strike. There was something sharply astringent about her then, like biting inadvertently into a green banana. And yet she had her gusts of enthusiasm over 'darling Babs.' The child was a monster of egoism, as may be imagined. She was very like her father physically—full-blooded, plump, bold-eyed, and with a perfectly devilish temper. Without warning she would explode, scream, scratch, bite, and kick, until she got what she wanted, when she would subside as suddenly into a self-centred silence broken by hiccoughs and chokes. She wanted everything—the watch and money out of your pocket and heart and liver out of your body. 'Angel child!' her mother would call her, and hang fondly over the odious little brat. For the angel child was still supposed to be 'delicate.' Mrs. Evans had a case of champagne and a stock of Bovril, and I dare say some of the displays I witnessed were due in part to intoxication. The carpenter was busy all day making gates and fences round the companion and bridge deck to prevent the delicate child from crawling out and getting slung overboard. I used to sit in the cabin with the angelic Babs on my knee, from which she was always slipping, listening to Mrs. Evans' account of the diphtheria, and watching Artemisia moving noiselessly to and fro in the bedroom or sitting just inside the spare stateroom door sewing. I never enjoyed looking at a girl so much in my life. She was not pretty in the ordinary sense of the word. Her skin was not the buttery yellow you associate with half-breeds. It was more the russet brown of a sunburned blonde. Her cheeks had a soft peachy glow under the brown bloom that was beautiful. And yet she did not give one the impression of sheer innocence and youth which was implied in her unique complexion. Her eyes were perfectly steady and unabashed, her figure was more mature and matronly than Mrs. Evans', and she had a gravity of poise and deliberate movement that one associates with the reflection born of experience. She gave me the impression, I may say, of a young person who had chanced upon some astounding revelation, and who was preoccupied with both past and future more than the immediate present. It made her more attractive than less, I think. She established a certain careless fondness for talking to Mr. Chief, as she called me. I dare say I was in love with her even then. She had a personality. I think Jack, who for all his crude psychology was a pretty shrewd judge of humanity, saw something beyond a mere desirable young girl in this nurse. He used to follow her round with his eyes as though he couldn't make her out. He couldn't recover from the shock of her name. He would sit in the saloon watching her with the child, and mutter 'Artemisia! Humph!' She would glance up from her occupation and regard him with steady, meditative eyes. I was fascinated by the name myself. It recalled Captain Macedoine to me. It was like him. Imagine that name reverberating down through the ages from ancient Attica to classical France, taken out across the Western Ocean by forlorn émigrés, who clung to their pretty trashy artificialities in spite of, or perhaps because of, the frightfulness of the wilderness, handed on by sentimental and aristocratic Creoles, filched by German Jews and prosperous mulattos, picked up right in the gutter by a supreme illusionist and given to a young person who seemed half school-girl and half adventuress.

"For it was perfectly obvious to me that whether I had diagnosed her character truly or not, she was not at all a suitable temperament to have about a child. There was, for instance, something ominous in the sudden quiet with which she would regard the angelic Babs when that odious little being began to pull her hair or jump on her feet or thump her across the back with the heavy cabin ruler. These things happened to me, too; but I could scarcely expect to escape. I was Jack's chum. I was a bachelor and therefore credited with a deep and passionate love of children. Artemisia, however, was a stranger. When something particularly outrageous occurred, Mrs. Evans, glancing up, would murmur, 'Oh, Babs, dear!' and then, to my considerable embarrassment, I would find Artemisia's eyes fixed inscrutably upon mine as she fended off the attentions of her charge. And so, when I rose one fine evening as we sailed along the Spanish coast, and she followed me up on deck, I felt that she was about to take me into her confidence. I looked round as she slammed the wicket which the carpenter had made to keep Babs from tumbling down and breaking her neck, and the girl's face was close to mine. We laughed quietly in the faint light that came up from the cabin. After all, there was not such a frightful disparity in our ages. As we walked aft along the bridge deck, and stood between the funnel casing and the life boats—a matter of seconds—I might have given a swerve to both our destinies. There are moments, you know, when one can spring over the most frightful chasms in one's journey through life, and land with both feet on mossy banks and enamelled meads. It was possibly such a moment, only I didn't take the chance. As I said, I prefer the part of super in the play—one sees so much more than either spectator or hero. And I think she saw, too, in the same flash of intelligence. And so, nothing happened. When she spoke she merely asked in a low tone what the punishment was for infanticide.

"'You know, Mr. Chief,' she went on, putting up her arms and swinging gently on the life-lines of the boats, 'It isn't fair. I'd never have taken it on if I'd known what I was in for. I have a devil of a temper. I'm sure I shall do something to that child.'

"'To keep it quiet?' I suggested. She nodded rapidly.

"'For good!' she replied, and added: 'They never used to let me have anything to do with the kids at school.'

"'Because of the temper?' She nodded again.

"'I nearly killed a girl once,' she remarked, calmly.

"'Oh, tut-tut!' I said, but she insisted, and her eyes gleamed with a sudden vixenish anger. 'Yes, Mr. Chief. She was a tall, fair girl with yellow hair and a lovely complexion, like an advertisement for soap. She hated me, and told the girls I would only be a nigger where she came from. Her father was in the Civil Service somewhere. And she kept on calling me nigger, and the other girls followed her lead until I was nearly crazy. And one night I went into the lavatory and put a piece of caustic soda into her sponge as it lay on the rack. And the next morning when she was washing there was a horrible row, and she ran up and down the bedroom screaming, and her face was all one smear of crimson and purple. She had to go to hospital and it took months to heal. The sponge was left in the water and there was nothing to show, but the girls knew I'd done it because I didn't run and see what was the matter. They didn't call me nigger any more, Mr. Chief.'

"I said I supposed not, and enquired if Mrs. Evans knew this story. Artemisia shrugged her shoulders and showed the tip of her tongue. 'I wouldn't tell her much,' she replied.

"'And you are going out to see your father?' she nodded. 'He wants me to help him in his business.'

"'He's not a captain now, I suppose?' I asked her, to see how much she knew. She was unconcerned. 'No, he retired from the sea when I was a little girl. We came home from the States. We lived near Saxhambury then. Do you know it? Father was very unfortunate. He lost on some of his investments and had to go abroad again. He was in Egypt a long while.'

"'And you haven't seen him since when?' I hazarded.

"'Oh, I met him when he came to Paris on business. You see, the company he's in now is French, and he is in a very important position out there.'

"It was clear she knew nothing. She had been brought up upon the customary vague references to 'position,' and so on, with which young people in the middle classes are inducted into the real world. One could imagine her telling her school-chums how her father had 'an important position out there,' and their subsequent awe and envy. I can remember a boy at school saying his dad was 'on the Continent,' when his fond parent had gone for a week-end at Boulogne. We were impressed. And I wondered what old Macedoine's job might happen to be. So I said that I had once been shipmates with a Captain Macedoine out in New Orleans. She exclaimed: 'Were you really! How funny!' and suddenly dropped her voice to a whisper. 'Were you friends, as you are with Captain Evans?' I said no, not exactly, and looked up at the figure of young Siddons on the bridge. He was looking at us, and paused in his walk to and fro trying to make out who I might be. I was thinking of him and wondering, when I heard her say that her father did not like America; he was never happy there. He was misunderstood. Well, many a man has been unhappy and misunderstood in America. Some men are so exacting in their ideals that no country can hope to win their approbation. Captain Macedoine was evidently still on a pilgrimage seeking a home for his wounded spirit. I asked his daughter if he were happy and understood in Ipsilon. She regarded me with attention for a moment, as though she suspected me of irony. Then she said, in the grave tones that middle-class people reserve for the vital themes of life, that he had a good position and excellent prospects. And then she left me with a murmur about 'the kid' and I began to walk to and fro. I was amused. I tried to figure out the salient features of a 'position' which would meet with the approval of a man with Macedoine's record. And the prospects! For mind you, he must have experienced a severe blow when those Federal secret service men had ferreted out his dealings in the opium traffic and his plan for establishing himself in England had gone to smash. And in what way could this young person assist him in his business? I was intrigued, as they say, but I could form no theory which would adequately account for so many disparate premises. After all, such musings are their own reward. The event robs them of their early glamour. I did not even confide in any one else on the ship. There is a pleasure in an unshared scandal which many men and all women seem to overlook. It added, I may say, to the joys of being a super in the play. And when Mr. Basil Bloom, our effulgent chief mate, informed me one evening that I seemed to be very chummy with Miss Macedoine, I only smiled and asked him if he had designs on her himself. He twisted his moustache, looked scornfully at the horizon, and was evidently perturbed. He had referred grandiloquently, during the previous voyages, to a peerless female whom he called 'the future Mrs. Bloom.' This lady lived at Greenwich, and we had reason to believe that Mr. Bloom, on the strength of his genteel manners, formidable moustache, and optimistic temperament, had been sponging on her family for some months before he joined the Manola. 'I'll tell the young lady,' I said, 'and perhaps you'll get some encouragement.' He assured me first that I needn't trouble, and then added that he knew I was the last person in the world to think less of a man if he changed his mind. This was so infernally unfair to the lady at Greenwich that I laughed in his face and walked away.

"The Second Mate took a different line. He was a quiet, inoffensive creature, and usually preoccupied with a feeble struggle which he maintained against whiskey. He had a delicately coloured, spiritual, refined face, with the salient points slightly sharpened, and he seemed to have neither thoughts, hopes, nor aspirations. However, his finely chiselled features appeared one day while we were in Alexandria with the addition of a greenish-yellow puff below the left eye, and the mess-room boy informed us that the Second Mate was having his meals in his room in future. There was a laugh from the Third Engineer, and I said nothing, for I had a notion he and the Second Mate had been ashore together. But the mess-room boy, whose slant eyes and long nose worried into all the scandal of the ship, added that young Mr. Siddons had blacked the Second Mate's eye for him, over the nurse. I told him to dry up. To tell the truth I was getting tired of the episode. I felt the whole thing was becoming tawdry and dropping to a rather low plane. I wasn't willing to admit this to myself, mind you, because it involved my old friend Jack. I mean it would be the Commander's fault if we all slumped into the mire together over this young woman. That's what commanders are for—to raise the tone. That's what a good many of them lack the character to do. Personal courage, professional skill, long experience, will carry a man through among men. When there are women in the case, a man needs something else. What? Well, it may sound strange to you, but I should call it simplicity of heart. It is almost the only thing women instinctively respect and fear. Good old Jack was simple in his way, but I doubted his ability to handle a crisis. I was thankful when we were through with Alexandria and were heading north for Ipsilon.

"For just as we were entering this sea cluttered with islands so thick you can always see four or five and sometimes a dozen at once, so we were in the midst of a score of dubious possibilities. Here was Jack avoiding me in an apologetic fashion. Here was the Chief Mate whispering to Mrs. Evans. Here was the Second Mate sitting in remote and solitary grandeur in his little cubby-hole, comforting himself with a bottle of Turkish gin. Here was young Siddons, very youthful-looking and shy, miserable because the Captain was looking black about something. Only the angel child and her mother seemed untouched by the horrible paralysis which was creeping upon us and for which they were primarily responsible. At all hours you could hear the roars of rage from the cabin when it wanted something—the roar, the squeals, the kicks, the hiccoughs, and the final sullen silence of satiety. I tell you, that woman and her baby were driving us all, including her husband, crazy, and she sat there oblivious. She wasn't even aware that Artemisia hated her.

"I don't know exactly what Jack had expected me to do to help him. No doubt if I had proposed to Artemisia during the voyage, married her in Alexandria, and left her ashore in a flat out at Mex or Gabbari he would have been satisfied. I should have got him out of a hole and got myself into one, which appeals to most of us. Or I might have acted like a man without any emotions at all, and repelled Artemisia's confidences with chilling disdain. This would have set a good example to the others, he may have thought. I have never gone in for setting a good example, however. I have found that even those who follow the example hate the man who sets it. And in addition, with the curious intuition of the illiterate, Jack suspected I had not been perfectly frank with him as to my intimacy with her. And so we were all on the watch, alert, uneasy, silent, and unhappy.

"I still went in to see Mrs. Evans of an evening. To tell the truth she fascinated me. I had always held the theory that no married woman could be an absolute fool. It had seemed to me that such contact with the realities of life as marriage involved must leave some austere mark of intelligence, some tinge of altruism, upon the most superficial. She seemed to disprove this. For her the world did not exist save for the 'angel child.' Even her husband was now only the nearly indispensable producer of income. She talked, not of him, or of her family, not of Art or Life or Death or the world to come, not even of Home or the things she had seen in Alexandria. She had seen nothing in Alexandria. She had declined to let Jack take her to Cairo 'because of the expense.' She read no books nor papers. She dressed in perfect propriety. And all the time she talked about the child, one hand near the child, her eyes fixed on the child's movements or repose. I think the voyage was a revelation to Jack. He was finding his place in the world. He was thinking in his honest, clumsy way. He never took his wife for a trip again. He loved his child as much as any man could, but this ingrowing infatuation, to the exclusion of every other desirable thing in the world, was fatiguing.

"And Artemisia! She sat in her little spare cabin opening on the saloon, and now and again she would raise her shoulders, draw a deep breath, let them drop again as though in despair, and go on with her sewing. She would laugh at me when I tried to amuse the child and distract it from some preposterous desire. It was not easy. Her tenacity of purpose was appalling. She was yelling one evening for someone to open the great medicine chest that stood by the brass fireplace. I tried the time-honoured ruses for placating the young. I said there was a lion inside who would jump out and eat Babs. I pretended to go and find the key and came back with the news that naughty Mr. Siddons had dropped it into the sea. The brat stopped to breathe for a moment and a faintly human expression came over the stupendously smug little face. I followed this up by a story of how Mr. Siddons had shown me how to make a pin float on the water. I hastily poured some water into a glass, got a piece of blotting paper, laid my pin on it, and waited for the homely trick to succeed. I had no luck somehow. The pin went to the bottom and Babs' opinion of me went with it. She suddenly remembered about the medicine chest and gave a preliminary yell. Mrs. Evans said, 'Oh, Babbsy, darling!' I got up and went out on deck. We were running among the islands. Away to the east-ward I could see the lights of the Roumania Lloyd mail-boat going south. Suddenly two hands grabbed the lappets of my patrol-coat, a dark, fluffy head leaned for a delicious moment against my chest, and Artemisia gurgled, 'Oh, Mister Chief, isn't she just a little fiend?' She had been listening to my blandishments and had witnessed the final destruction of my hopes. She put her hands behind her back, threw up her head, and regarded me with amusement. 'Why,' she whispered, 'why didn't you open the medicine chest, and give her the prussic-acid to play with?' And then, without waiting for an answer, she turned and looked across at the islands we were passing. She sighed. 'Just look at them! How do they know which is Ipsilon? Mister Chief, Mister Chief, I am afraid.'

"'What of?' I asked. She sighed again.

"'Of the future,' she said. 'This is a change for me. I don't know what's coming. I haven't had any luck yet.'

"I asked her in what way.

"'You know, Mister Chief, I have been in several situations. I was a typist....' she shrugged her shoulders.

"'Your father will be here,' I suggested, but she paid no attention, merely looking at the dark blots on the sea that were islands. And then she remarked in a perfectly level and unconcerned voice that sometimes she wished she was dead. I patted her on the shoulder.

"'Go to bed, my child,' I remarked, coldly, 'you'll feel better in the morning. You won't wish you were dead when Captain Macedoine comes aboard to fetch you.'

"She walked away in silence and went down to the cabin. I have often wondered if she had not intended to make some sort of confession. Perhaps it was a moment in her life when she became suddenly aware of her insecurity, of her lack of the kindly props and supports which hold most of us up and give us a good opinion of ourselves. For really she lacked everything. As I found out later, as she stood talking to me that evening and trying to find some easy yet adequate method of taking me into her confidence without losing my esteem, she lacked everything that most girls have. She was one of those tragic figures who even lack innocence without having gained any corresponding experience. And perhaps she felt for a moment the shadow of her destiny upon her, and seeing the dark path among the islands she was to tread, shrank back, doubtful even of the power of her father to carry her through."

CHAPTER III

Mr. Spenlove, sitting forward in his deck chair, felt in his pocket for his cigarette-case and looked round satirically into the profound shadow of the awning. He still preserved the appearance of a man talking to himself, but the fancy crossed his mind, as he glanced at the long horizontal forms in the deck chairs, that he was addressing a company of laid-out corpses. The air was very still, but a light breeze on the open water beyond the nets, and the full splendour of a circular moon, reminded him of an immense sheet of hammered silver. But Mr. Spenlove did not look long at the Ægean. He swivelled round a little and pointed with the burnt-out match at the large plain building he had indicated at the beginning of his story. It was not a beautiful building. It had the rectangular austerity of a continental customs house or English provincial "Athenæum." It was built close to the cliff and the outer wall was provided with a flight of stairs which ascended, in a mysterious and disconcerting manner, to the second floor. All this was clearly visible in the brilliant moonlight, and even the long valley behind, with its dim vineyards and clumps of almond, olive, and fig trees half concealing the square white houses that dotted the perspective, were subtly indicated against the enormous background of the tunnelled uplands and bare limestone peaks. Mr. Spenlove held the match out for a moment and then flicked it away.

"Romantic, isn't it? This was how it looked the night we anchored, and Artemisia came up to me as I stood by the engine-room skylights with my binoculars. It was she who pointed out to me how romantic it was. I asked her why. I said: 'This place is simply an iron mine. To-morrow they'll put us under those tips you see sticking out of the cliff there and a lot of frowsy Greeks will run little wooden trucks full of red dust and boulders and empty them with a crash into the ship. And there'll be red dust in the tea and the soup and in your hair and eyes and nose and mouth. And there'll be nothing but trouble all the time. Very romantic!' So I sneered, but she wasn't taken in by it a bit. She looked through the glasses, and laughed. 'Oh, it's beautiful!' she murmured, 'beautiful, beautiful.'

"I said, 'How do beautiful things make you feel?' and she turned on me for a moment. 'You know,' she said, and was silent. And I did know. It was the bond between us. We had become aware of it unconsciously. It had nothing to do with our age or our sex or our position in life. It was the common ground of our intense anger with the other people on the ship. Do you know, I have often thought that Circe has been misjudged. Men become swinish before women who are unconscious of their unlovely transformation. Circe should be painted with her eyes fixed in severe meditation, oblivious of the grunting, squeaking beasts around her. Artemisia was like that. She really cared nothing for the ridiculous performances of the various animals on the ship. Nothing for the magniloquent Mr. Basil Bloom, clearing his throat behind his dirty hand; nothing for the Second Mate, with his perpetual expression of knowing something about her and being mightily amused by it. Nothing even for poor young Siddons, badly hit, moping out of sight, heaving prodigious sighs and getting wiggings for being absent-minded. As for the Second and Third, my particular henchmen, she didn't know they existed. Honourable! Why of course, they were all honourable in their intentions. Didn't Mr. Bloom express his willingness to throw over the young lady at Greenwich, although he owed her father fifty pounds? Didn't the Second Engineer drop a note down her ventilator saying he had a hundred in the Savings Bank and she had only to say the word? (And didn't Mrs. Evans pick it up and take it, speechless with annoyance, to Jack, who roared with laughter?) Honourable? Of course they all wanted to marry her. Swine are domestic animals."

The Surgeon, who had caused this digression, made a vague murmur of protest. Mr. Spenlove drummed on the chair between his legs and shrugged his shoulders, but he didn't turn round.

"I didn't offer to tell you a love-story. Captain Macedoine's daughter, if she means anything, means just this: that love means nothing. She passed through all the dirty little gum-shoe emotions which she inspired on the Manola like a moonbeam through a foul alley. For it is foul, this eternal preoccupation with sex, like a lot of flies over a stagnant, fecundating pool. Beauty! You all talk largely of appreciating beauty, and you don't know, the most educated and cultured of you, the first thing about it. Your idea of beauty is a healthy young female without too many clothes. I tell you, I have seen ships so perfect and just in modelling that I have marvelled at the handiwork of my fellowmen. I have seen cities at sunrise so beautiful I have gone down to my room and shed tears of ridiculous sorrow. And I have seen the patrons of female beauty, too, coming back from the cities to the ships with dry palates, and their neckties under their ears....

"Well! We stood there, and to ease the pressure of the moment she put up the binoculars and swept the little beach, finally coming to rest at the big house—Grünbaum's house. While we had been talking a light had come out on the balcony, and figures began to move about with the precise and enigmatic motions of marionettes. Without glasses I could see Grünbaum seated at a table with a big lamp over his head. Another figure moved to the open side and stood still. I was wondering what this portended when Grünbaum half rose and waved his arms, and the other figure turned and dwindled rapidly into obscurity, suddenly coming into the light again at the other side of the table. And Artemisia said quietly, 'There's father!' and handed me the binoculars.

"To say that I was interested would not put the matter in its true light. I was more than that. There was a fantastic quality in the whole business which was almost supernatural. It is strange enough to meet a person after many years; stranger still to meet one who has made a powerful yet unsympathetic impression upon you—to meet him with all your old dislikes and prejudices washed to a clear and colourless curiosity. But to see such a man as I saw Captain Macedoine, afar off, through an atmosphere charged with the electric blue radiance of moonlight, moving in an alien orbit, animated by unknown emotions—why, it was like seeing a man who was dead and gone to another world! I raised the glasses and focussed them. Captain Macedoine stood leaning heavily on his hands as they grasped the edge of the table, and he was staring straight out at me. Of course he could see nothing beyond the balcony, but the impression was exactly that of a man striving to win back across the gulf to his former existence. And his strained immobility was accentuated by the figure of Grünbaum with his jerkily moving arms, his polished forehead gleaming in the lamplight, the gyrations of his chin as he turned every moment or so and looked up sideways at the other. Grünbaum flourished papers, reaching out and rearranging them, throwing himself back in his chair and beating the table with a folded document to emphasize his words. And every now and again the whole scene grew dim as though it were a phantasmagoria, and about to dissolve, when the smoke from Grünbaum's cigar floated and hung in the still air.

"And I discovered, too, that I had no words in which to formulate the peculiar impressions this scene made upon me. I could find no adequate remark! The girl at my side, reaching out absently for the glasses, made no sign that this scene going on half a mile away was at all strange to her. For all one could gather, Captain Macedoine's daughter was accustomed to see her father submitting passively to the onslaughts of foreign concessionaires every day in the week. I gazed at her as she stood there by the awning-stanchion looking at her magnificent parent, and it was suddenly borne in upon me that it is a miracle we ever learn anything about each other at all in this world. There is nothing so inscrutable as an ordinary human being, I am convinced, and I have been watching them for thirty years. What we know and can tell, even the acutest of us, is no more than the postmark on a letter. What's inside—ah, if we only knew. What? Absurd? By no means. I believe married people do occasionally accomplish it in a small way. I mean I believe they attain to a fairly complete comprehension of each other's souls. But as to whether the game is worth the candle they never divulge....

"Certainly Artemisia did not at that moment. She left me, as every woman I have ever met has left me, groping. She sighed softly and returned the glasses, remarking again, 'Yes, there's Father,' and bade me good-night without a word of explanation. Mind, I don't say I had any right to such a word. I don't even feel sure she understood anything at all about her father's position on that island. The bare fact remains that I expected some explanation simply because I credited her with a character light yet strong, and capable of supporting the weight of her father's confidence.

"For observe; if this girl was ignorant of everything, if she came out here a mere child agape with curiosity, then Macedoine must have been that extremely rare phenomenon, a completely lonely man. And I was not prepared to admit the possibility of such an existence for him. He was one of those men who can live, no doubt, without friendship, but who must have their audience. So much at least I knew of him in the old days in the Maracaibo Line, when he would sit near us in Fabacher's on Royal Street, ostentatiously reading a month-old copy of the London Financial News. It was this incessant urge to inspire wonder which led him to hint, indirectly, that he had been at school at the Charterhouse. Risky? Of course it was risky; and I should never have plumbed the mystery but for a most unimpressionable London purser who informed me there was a ragged school for slum children in the Charterhouse district in the city. Not that it mattered. We were not Macedoine's game. It was the bishops and colonels and eminent surgeons who made the round trip of the West Indies with us whom he wished to impress. Whether he was a fraud or not, he certainly had acquired a way of ignoring common people such as we who go to sea. I knew he would regard good old Jack from such a lofty pinnacle that Jack would appear to him no more than one of the Greek labourers who shoved the little wooden cars along and tumbled their contents into the ship with a terrific clang of ironstone on iron, and clouds of red dust. I followed up this digression in my mind and arrived at the fascinating conclusion that if my recollection served me sufficiently well, he would not recognize me. He never had recognized me. I once had the pleasure of telling him that if his men didn't keep my room clean and tidy I would knock his head off. He never looked up from his desk until my grip on his collar tightened and his body began to rock to and fro. He complained to the Commander, who had been told of the incident by the Chief. 'Is this the engineer who assaulted you, Mr. Macedoine?' says the Captain. Macedoine examined me with a distant, preoccupied air, pressing his lips together and his eyebrows raised. He shrugged his shoulders, opened his lips with a slight smacking noise, and after quite a pause, a most imposing pause, he said he 'really couldn't say; these workmen were all so much alike when they were dirty....' Old Pomeroy—he was the first decent skipper the Maracaibo Line ever had—swung round on his chief steward and retorted: 'Then what the devil are you wasting all our time for?' He swung back to his desk again, muttering and slapping papers here and there. 'Preposterous—doesn't know who assaulted him.... Never heard....' I was standing as stiff as a stanchion waiting for the Old Man to say I could go, when he saw Macedoine pussy-footing it to the door. 'Oh, and Macedoine,' called the Old Man. Macedoine stopped but did not look round. 'I expect the engineers on my ship to be referred to as engineers, not 'workmen.'' Silence, Macedoine looking at the back of his hand and smiling with the corner of his mouth pulled down. 'Understand!' thundered the Old Man, rising from his chair but holding it by the arms. It was so sudden I nearly collapsed. I thought he was going to throw Macedoine through the door. That lofty personage was startled, too. He replied hastily: 'Oh, quite so, Captain, er....' when old Pomeroy sat down and dipping his pen in the ink, shut him up with 'Then don't forget it, and don't wait.'

"I mention this highly unusual episode for a special reason. It happened to provide one specific proof of my theory that Macedoine was an artist in his method of building up that grotesque effigy which he presented to the world as himself. He was like that eccentric rich person who once built a most astonishing house in Chelsea many years ago. You remember? It was called So-and-So's Folly. It stood on a valuable site, and each story was decorated in a different style. The basement was Ph[oe]nician and the roof was pure Berlin. But the horrible thing about that house was, not its bizarre commingling of periods, its terra-cotta tigers and cast-iron chrysanthemums, but the fact that inside it was a hollow, spider-haunted shell. There was not even a back to it. There were no floors laid on the joists, weathered planks blocked up the back, and a few forlorn green statues stood amid a dank jungle of creepers and grass and rubbish. Now that was how Macedoine impressed me, and what I was going to say was that by accident I obtained later a peep into his studio, so to speak, and saw his method of putting up that marvellous front, behind which, as you have already learned, there was nothing save the dreamy dirtiness of avarice and ego-mania. No, the solitary and grandiose idea in his mind precluded all recollection of individual humanity. It was not that he forgot us who had been his shipmates. He had never known us. We had not the wit to be knaves, or the credulity to accept him at his own colossal valuation. We ignored his enigmatic claim to greatness, while he passed sublimely along, disdainful of our obvious virtues. For it is presumable that we had virtues, since the world—anxious for the replenishing of its larders—hails us nowadays as heroes because we prefer the dangers of sea-life to the tedious boredom of a shore-going existence....

"Yes, I saw into his studio, watched the artist at work at first hand. I might claim the honour, indeed, of being one of the lumps of clay upon which he sought to model his design. Surely an authentic witness this; and I dare say the normal artist's material—since we are fond of saying he blows the breath of life into it—might not join in the universal praise bestowed upon its creator, but might indulge in ironic contemplation of its own birth-pangs and the strange fortunes of its pre-natal existence!

"He did not appear, however, as my stimulated imagination had pictured him appearing, to dominate the situation on the Manola and preoccupy us all with his personality and hypothetical power. Like a higher power, he remained invisible, and Captain Evans, going ashore in a boat with Artemisia and her belongings around him, was the first to encounter him in Grünbaum's office. Encountered him, and came back bursting with the most astonishing tidings. I was sitting in my room that evening after tea, having a quiet pipe and a book, when Jack came down.

"'Come along to my room, Fred,' he said, blowing clouds from his cigar. 'I want to talk to you.'

"'Why not here?' I suggested.

"'No, I want the wife to hear it, too. The gel's gone and the kid's asleep. Come along.'

"And highly mystified, I went along. It seemed like scandal, and I am not above such things once in a way, as you know. I went along, and found Mrs. Evans in her husband's cabin sewing. Nothing would do but I must have a cigar, and the angel child having been dosed with what her mother called 'chempeen', I had to have a glass of that, too. Jack was flushed and excited, and sat down beside me on the red plush settee.

"'What do you say,' he began, in a low, husky tone, 'to a job ashore, Fred?'

"So that was it. The age-old chimera of a 'job ashore.' I looked at Mrs. Evans. Her lips were shut to a thin line. I could see protest and dissent in every line of her body.

"'For you or for me?' I enquired, softly.

"'For me, and p'raps for you, too, if you play your cards. It's like this': and he began a long and complicated explanation. The gel's father, as he called Macedoine, had got the job of secretary to the company and somehow didn't hit it off with old Grünbaum, who was resident concessionaire. Of course I knew Grünbaum's father, who had been the original prospector when the island was Turkish, sold most of his holdings to the French company, but kept a tenth which descended to his son who had succeeded him in the concession. Well, Grünbaum wouldn't hear of a lot of improvements which Macedoine wanted to introduce. The gel's father was full of modern ideas. Wanted to put in electric traction for the mines, with electric elevators and tips, and so on. He also wanted to develop the place, and had a plan for irrigation to attract settlers. Grünbaum wouldn't hear of it. Very conservative Grünbaum was. Got his tenth of the three francs per ton on the ore, and a thousand a year as manager, and was satisfied. Didn't want settlers. He was king of the island and he and Macedoine had had a row. Macedoine was sick of it. All this had been explained to Jack by a young Greek, a clerk in the office, who was sick of it, too, and was 'going in' with Macedoine in his new venture. And what was that? Well, it was this way: Macedoine, who had knocked about a bit, had taken an option on some sites in Saloniki, he had bought a sixty-fourth share in the Turkish steamboat which carried the mails to the islands, and he was going into the development of Saloniki. Had formed a small preliminary company, registered in Athens, to take up the options, and he wanted directors. This young Greek, Nikitos, was to be secretary, knowing the languages, you see. He wanted directors, practical men to superintend the actual business while he, Macedoine, you understand, would be free to control the financial side of the affair. Oh, it was a big thing. There was to be a big hotel, a big brewery, a big shipping business, a big real estate development in Macedonia, a big railroad system, and a big fleet of ships to carry away the freight which comes from all this. Everything was to be big, big! Jack blew clouds of smoke, big clouds, and flourished his fat hands in the air. 'What did I think? Wasn't it worth jumping at? Five founder's shares of a thousand drachmas each in the preliminary company, convertible into preferred stock in the big concern and ten thousand drachmas a year salary. Eh? What did I think? Wasn't it a sound investment? What about it?' And Jack bored into my ribs with his powerful finger.

"I looked at Mrs. Evans. It was evident she had already heard something of this magnificent scheme for making us all millionaires, and her verdict was evident enough also. She never raised her eyes from her sewing where she sat in a cane chair, her hair smooth and shining, her dress smooth and shining, too, the embodiment of prim respectability and prudence. She had often inspired me with a crazy ambition to see her being chased by a lunatic with a razor in his hand, or pursued by a hungry Bengal tiger—to see her in some predicament which would crack the shell of middle-class reserve in which she was secreted and show me the live, scampering human being within: but just now I was appalled by the formidable aspect of her disapproval. Even Jack was aware of it, for he watched me to see what I would say. And what could I say? What could any sane human being, with a knowledge of the world, say? I didn't say anything. I scratched my chin and pretended to be thinking deeply.

"For without claiming any especial perspicuity, I must confess that I have never been the raw material out of which 'suckers' are manufactured. It has always seemed to me pertinent to enquire, when Golcondas and Eldorados are offered for a song, why the vendor should be so anxious to hypothecate his priceless privileges. I suppose I am a skeptic. Business, after all, is very much like Religion: it is founded on Faith. And men like my friend Jack, for instance, have great faith in the written word, much more in the beautifully engraved word. For them all the elaborate bunkum by which the financial spell-binder conceals his sinister intentions is of no avail; the jargon of the prospectus, the glittering generalties, the superb optimism, the assumption of austere rectitude, the galaxy of distinguished patrons who for a consideration lend their names to the venture. For it is a venture, and men have always a pathetic hope that it may become an adventure as well, and that their ship will come labouring home, loaded with gold.

"Women, especially married women, are not at all like that, but they are not so much skeptics as infidels. They start up at the first distant approach of the financier, every plume and pin-feather quivering. They don't believe a word of it. They go down on their knees to their husbands and beg and beseech and supplicate them to have nothing to do with it. They shed tears over their children. They write long letters of distracted eloquence to their mothers. The very extremity of their impotence lends a certain tragic dignity to their tantrums. Of course if the cruel domestic tyrant persists in casting his bread upon the waters and speculation turns out to be a huge success, these Cassandras spend the dividends with a sort of stern joy, as though the money were tainted and they must exchange it for something useless and inconvenient as soon as possible. They know, by instinct, I suppose, that a chiffonier or a Chippendale bedroom suite is not legal tender for stock. They feel they've got something. It is a truism, I suppose, to say that women are implacable realists.

"Mrs. Evans was. And she knew, too, that I was of her opinion in this matter. She never raised her eyes to look at me; but she knew. Her lips never relaxed from the rigid line they had assumed when I came down, as though she was still waiting, in severe patience, for me to do my obvious duty, and corroborate her opinion.

"'What is he putting into it?' I asked, casually.

"'He's the vendor,' retorted Jack, who had picked up the vernacular pretty quickly. 'He turns over his options and his share in this mail-boat for ten founder's shares and a seat on the board, see? Then, when the big company's formed, he takes up shares in that, and is voted a salary of twenty thousand drachmas a year as financial adviser. That's how Nikitos put it to me. Nikitos knows the country and he says there's any amount of capital available once the thing gets started. These tobacco growers don't know what to do with their money—keep it in those big Turkish trousers, most of it, he reckons. The great thing is to get in at the beginning. What do you say? He wants a ship-master and he wants a man with engineering experience to overlook the shipping business. I told Nikitos I'd talk it over with you. He says the skipper of that Swedish ship that's on the same charter as us is putting three hundred into it—seven thousand five hundred drachmas.'

"'But what did Macedoine say?' I persisted.

"Oh, I didn't see him,' admitted Jack, looking at the floor between his fat knees. 'Nikitos promised to arrange an interview if we decided to come in.'

"There it was, you see, the touch of the Master. I could not help a silent tribute of admiration to Captain Macedoine for this remarkable reserve, this exquisite demonstration of psychological insight. A man of great affairs! A financial magnate, graciously extending to us the privilege of participating in his immense schemes. 'An interview could be arranged!' It was superb, this method of mesmerizing all the simple-minded skippers and chiefs who came in the iron-ore ships to Ipsilon. I had a brief but vivid vision of us all ashore in Saloniki squabbling and bluffing each other, while Macedoine sat enthroned, apart, the financial adviser, dwelling in oriental magnificence upon our contributions.

"'What do you think, Mrs. Evans?' I asked, taking the bull by the horns. 'Shall we gamble a hundred or so and get rich quick?'

"'You're not married,' she replied, without looking up. 'You can spare it I dare say. It is different for Jack. He hasn't any money to throw away.'

"'Well,' I said, 'I haven't any to throw away, either, I can assure you. I wouldn't go to sea if I had. But Jack thinks this is a great opportunity to invest his money where he can look after it. You see, he'll be drawing a salary as well when he's ashore in Saloniki.'

"Still she didn't look up. She had not budged an inch from her conviction that I agreed with her.

"'I couldn't think of living abroad,' she said, severely. 'I have Babs to consider.'

"I'm afraid Jack hadn't thought of that. He hadn't visualized his wife and baby dwelling in a Turkish town, cut off by thousands of miles of ocean from home. He had been so preoccupied with the divine prospect of 'a job ashore' that he had forgotten the environment. And we had been to Saloniki with coal, time and again. I can't say I blamed her. Residence in southeastern Europe has its drawbacks for a housewife. And quite apart from a natural repugnance to dirt, Mrs. Evans had an unnatural repugnance to anything foreign. She never really left England. She took it with her. She carried with her into her husband's cabin, and along the wild oriental foliage and architecture of Alexandrian streets, the prim and narrow ideals of her native valley. It never occurred to her that those people in turbans and fezzes were human. It never occurred to her when a French or Italian girl passed, dressed with the dainty and charming smartness of her race, that she might possibly be virtuous as well. She shrivelled at their very proximity, drawing the angelic Babs from their contamination. She was uneasy, and would continue to be uneasy, until she was safe at home once more in Threxford, England. That was the burden of her unuttered longing: to get home, to get home, back to the little semi-detached red-brick villa on the Portsmouth Road, which her father had given her for a wedding present and which fifty Macedoines would never induce her to sell.

"For that is what it would mean if Jack invested even two hundred pounds in this wonderful enterprise to develop Macedonia. He had spent several hundred in furnishing the house, and since then most of his two hundred a year had gone in expenses, for he was no niggard either with himself or those he loved. Neither wife nor chick of his should ever lack for anything, he had told me proudly. If a neighbour's child got some expensive and useless contraption to pull about, Babs had one, too, the very next week. If a neighbour's wife got a fur coat, Mrs. Evans had orders to go and do likewise, a more expensive one if possible. What little he had was on deposit in the bank in his wife's name, so that she could draw on it while he was away.

"And so I came round to the unpleasant conviction that while Mrs. Evans was silently awaiting my repudiation of the whole thing, her husband was expecting me to use my eloquence to persuade his wife to let him invest. They say a bachelor has no worries of his own. Which is as well, when his married friends endeavour to make him responsible for their own follies, and use him as a cushion to soften the family collisions. I was an old hand and slipped out. And I really was not thinking so much of my own two hundred pounds salted down in Home Rails, as of Jack's home, when I said, cheerfully:

"'Well, this Captain Macedoine can't object to giving us a little more information. And he can't expect us to have the cash with us. We shall have to go home and sell something and—er—draw the money, eh?'

"'It is quite out of the question,' said Mrs. Evans, biting her thread as though she was severing the spinal chord of the whole proposition.

"'So what I suggest is, Jack will see Captain Macedoine and we'll take the voyage home to think about it.' And I looked at Mrs. Evans to approve my machiavellian astuteness.

"'Oh, it's quite impossible, quite. I couldn't think of leaving England. And we couldn't spare the money.'

"'We shouldn't need the house if we came out here,' said Jack, looking solemnly at his wife. She stiffened.

"'We can't sell the house,' she muttered through her teeth. 'Where should we live? I've told you. Jack, it's quite impossible.'

"'The house 'ud fetch three hundred and fifty,' said Jack, looking at me with round solemn eyes, 'and the furniture 'ud fetch two hundred more. And there's—how much is there in the bank, Madeline? Say sixty odd. Six hundred pounds. You can live cheap in a place like Saloniki.'

"I could see Mrs. Evans was going to pieces. She went dull red and then dull white, dropped a stitch or so, moved her feet, took a deep breath through her nostrils. I was seeing the human being at last. The lunatic with the razor was after her. The Bengal tiger was growling near by.

"'Don't be in such a hurry,' I said, sharply, and for the first time that woman gave me a glance that might be tortured into a faint semblance of gratitude. 'I am not going into a thing until I've studied it, and nobody but a madman would commit himself on anybody's mere say-so. You see Macedoine, Jack, when you go ashore.'

"'You'd better come, too,' he said, rather glumly. 'Old Grünbaum wants some coal if you can spare it. Forty ton, he said. It'll be a fiver for you. Can you let him have it and get to Algiers?'

"'I'll see,' I said. 'I'll go through the bunkers in the morning.' And we left the dangerous subject for the time being. It was positively refreshing to get out of the heavy atmosphere charged with Macedoine's grandiose schemes and Mrs. Evans' premonitions of disaster and beggary for herself and Babs. That angel child slept through it all on the far end of the big plush settee, fenced in with a teak bunk-board, one predatory hand clutching the throat of an enormous teddy bear whose eyes stared upward with the protruding fixity of strangulation, as though even in sleep she found it necessary to cause someone or something acute discomfort. Yes, it was refreshing, for I don't mind admitting that the petty graft of a five-pound note that I was to get from Grünbaum for selling him forty tons of coal was more to me than all the cloudy millions of Macedoine's imagination. I am as anxious as any one to get something for nothing, but this Anglo-Hellenic Development Company, in which I was to get four hundred a year for living in Saloniki, didn't appeal. In the regions of fancy Macedoine was an incomparable inspiration; in business I preferred the unimaginative concessionaire. As I rose to go up on deck, I felt that whether Mrs. Evans was grateful or not I had earned her approbation. Perhaps she, with her feminine intuition—or possibly it was only the instinct of self-preservation—saw the necessity of flattering a poor silly single man, for she remarked, with her head bent over the child's to touch the tumbled locks:

"'I'm sure Mr. Spenlove will give you the best advice, dear.'

"And I felt my bosom swell with pride. Oh, women are wonderful! Even an inferior woman, as Mrs. Evans was, with a soul like a parched pea, and a heart so narrow that there was scarcely room in it for husband and child at the same time, a woman of meagre physique and frumpish in dress—even she could do a little in the animal-taming way—could crack a whip and make the lords of the jungle jump through paper hoops, and eat out of her hand. Oh, yes! Even she could harness us and drive us tandem through the narrow gate of her desire. She was sure I would give dear Jack the best advice. And in the glow of this benediction I departed.

"Mr. Bloom was on deck, moving softly to and fro, smoking an immense meerschaum carved to the likeness of a skull. It was a warm evening and he had discarded coat and vest, displaying a soiled starched shirt and black suspenders inadequately furnished with buttons. The doorway was in shadow and for a moment I watched him, promenading in the moonlight. He had the air, as he stepped back and forth, of sharing his vigil with some invisible companion. At times he nodded, and waving his pipe toward the rail, might have been holding forth in unspoken words. Getting the best of the argument, of course, I reflected bitterly, and startled him by stepping out in front of him.

"'Good evening, Chief. Fine night for courtin', eh? A night like this reminds me o' the time when I was master. The moonlight, and the cliff, like the Morro. I was under the Cuban flag then you know, Chief. This brings it all back.' He waved his grisly meerschaum and added: 'Lovely place, Havana.'

"'Where's the Third Mate?' said Captain Evans, suddenly emerging from the dark doorway. 'He isn't in his cabin.'

"'He went ashore with the pilot in the cutter, Sir,' said Mr. Bloom. 'I did think of blowin' the whistle, only it occurred to me it might disturb the baby.'

"To this piece of extreme consideration Jack offered no reply. He walked along as far as the engine-hatch and then, putting his fingers in his mouth, blew a shrill blast that echoed and reëchoed between the cliffs. Men began to move about the ship, and a sailor appeared with a hurricane-lamp. A faint cry came out of the intense shadow of the western shore and Jack answered it with a stentorian 'Cutter ahoy!' that boomed and reverberated over our heads and trailed away into a wild racket of distant laughter.

"'Don't shout so loud, man,' I suggested, when a cry once more came out of the shadow and we could see a faint glow as of a lantern in a boat moving toward us.

"'Just been havin' a little look round, I dessay,' remarked Mr. Bloom with a bland tolerance of youthful folly which I remember irritated me intolerably. Jack kept his gaze fixed on the slowly moving glow.

"'There's something wrong,' he remarked, soberly, ignoring Mr. Bloom at his elbow.

"'Oh, I don't think so, Captain. Only a ...'

"'I tell you there's something wrong!' snarled Jack, turning on him suddenly. 'Stand by at the ladder there,' and the man with the hurricane-lamp said, quietly, 'Right, Sir.' Jack returned his gaze to the boat, which was approaching the edge of the shadow. How he knew, I don't pretend to explain. I take it he had a flair, as the French say, the sort of flair most of us acquire in our own profession and take for granted, but which always appears uncanny in another. And it was remarkable how the conviction that there was something wrong seized upon the ship and materialized in a line of shadowy figures leaning on the bulwarks and projecting grotesquely illuminated faces into the light of the lamp on the gangway.

"'Mr. Siddons there?' called Jack, quietly, as the boat came into view in the moonlight. The man at the tiller sang out 'No, Sir,' as he put the rudder over and added, 'way 'nuff. Catch hold there!' and another figure stood up in the bows and laid hold of the grating.

"'Stand by,' said Jack coming down to the after deck. 'Come up here, you,' he added, addressing the man who had spoken. The man, one of the sailors, came up.

"'We were waitin' for Mr. Siddons, Sir, when you hailed.'

"'What orders did he leave?'

"'Said he was going up the beach a little way, Sir. Told us he wouldn't be long.'

"'Where did you land the pilot?'

"'At Mr. Grünbaum's jetty, Sir. It's the best for a big boat.'

"'Then where is he now?'

"'I couldn't say, Sir,' said the man. 'He went up the path with the pilot; that's all we know.'

"Jack took a turn along the deck.

"'P'raps I'd better go and 'unt him up,' suggested Mr. Bloom, stroking his moustache.

"'And leave me here with one mate and no pilot?' said Jack. 'Fred, you go.' He followed me into my room where I had a pocket-torch, and whispered, 'Go up yourself, Jack. See what I mean? He's a decent young feller, even if I do find fault. Don't let the men see anything.'

"'You don't think he's gone on the booze?' I said, incredulously.

"'I don't know what to think,' he retorted, irritably. 'I always thought he had plenty o' principle. You can't tell nowadays. But we don't want him to spoil himself at the beginning of his career. Understand what I mean?'

"As I sat in the stern of the cutter while the men pulled back into the shadow which was about to engulf the ship (for the moon was setting) I felt I liked Jack the better for that kindly whisper out of earshot of the estimable Mr. Bloom. It was like him. Now and again you could look into the depths of his character, where dwelt the old immemorial virtues of truth and charity and loyalty to his cloth. I even twisted round on the gunwale as I steered and looked back affectionately at his short, corpulent figure walking to and fro on the bridge deck, worrying himself about the 'young feller,' the embodiment of a rough yet exquisite altruism. It seemed to me a manifestation of love at least as worthy of admiration as was his domestic fidelity. Oh, yes! You fellows call me a cynic, but I believe in love, nevertheless. It is only your intense preoccupation with one particular sort of love which evokes the cynicism and which inspires the monstrous egotism of women like Mrs. Evans.

"'Hard over, Sir,' said the leading seaman. 'Way 'nuff, boys!' I flashed my torch upon the tiny jetty which Grünbaum had made near his house, for he often went on fishing expeditions round the island, I had heard. Steps had been cut down from a path in the face of the cliff which led away up to some workings facing the sea, but which are out of sight. When I had climbed up the jetty I said:

"'Now you wait here while I go along to the house, and make enquiries. I don't suppose he's very far off.'

"I made my own way up the rough stones to the path, midway between the soft whisper of the waves and the frightful edge above my head and I felt a momentary vertigo. I was suspended in the depths of an impenetrable darkness. All things—the jetty, the boat, the path, were swallowed up. Even the ship was indicated only by the faint hurricane-lamp at the gangway and the reflection of the galley-fire against a bulkhead. Stone for building and for buttressing the mine-galleries had been quarried out below, and the path was under-cut and littered about with the débris of an old ore-tip. I moved slowly toward Grünbaum's house, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I saw another path, a more slanting stairway, on the face of the cliff. I paused. It was some hundred yards or so to where Grünbaum's house stood, as you see, at the foot of the slope. In the darkness Jack's words seemed to me to shed light. There was something wrong. But if something was wrong, if young Siddons had come to some harm, how had it happened? He must have had some motive in leaving a cutter with six men to wait for him. As for my idiotic suggestion that he might have gone on the booze, there wasn't a café within three miles that young Siddons would enter. He must have had some plan. Of course we are told, with wearisome insistence, to look for the woman; but we don't in real life. We look for all sorts of motives before we look for the woman. And even if I did in this instance suppose for a moment that Siddons had gone off on some mysterious adventure involving say, Captain Macedoine's daughter, I was no further advanced. He could hardly have told the sailors to wait. It was against all traditions of the service. And as I was deciding that he must have come to harm, and wondering how the deuce I was to discover him, a light shone out for a moment above me, I saw a figure silhouetted in a doorway and then vanish. Someone had gone in. I started up the steep by-path to make enquiries. I knew the pilot, a predatory person from Samos, had a hutch on the mountain somewhere, and it occurred to me that he had negotiated the sale of a flask or two of the sweetish wine of the island, and young Siddons had seized the opportunity to get it aboard without the old man knowing it. Quite a rational theory, I thought, as I toiled up the path getting short of breath. And suddenly I came upon the door which had opened and closed, a door in a house like a square white flat-topped box, with a window in one side shedding a faint glow upon a garden of shrubs.

"And now I was in a quandary. I sat down on a bowlder to take a breath. Supposing I knocked at the door and asked if any one had seen the Third Mate, and the inhabitants had not seen him and couldn't understand me, I should have done no good. And supposing they had seen him, or that he was inside, I should have some difficulty in explaining my interest in his private affairs. For I liked him, and we are always afraid of those whom we like. It is not only that we fear to tarnish our own reputation in their eyes, but we suffer a mingled terror and pleasure lest we discover them to be unworthy of their exalted position in our affections. So I got up and instead of knocking at the door I stepped among the shrubs and came to the window. And sitting close against the wall, with a small table in front of him and his head on his hand, sat Captain Macedoine.

"He was old. He showed, as we say, the ravages of time. And not of time only. Time alone could not furrow a human face into so many distorting folds and wrinkles. As I recalled the sleek, full-fed condition of his big smooth-shaven face when I had known him in the old days, I was revolted at the change. It was as though an evil spirit had been striving for years to leave him, and had failed. The cheeks were sunk into furrows of gray stubble and had sagged into sardonic ridges round the thin, wavering line of the mouth. The red eyelids blinked and twitched among the innumerable seams that ran back to the sparse, iron-gray hair. The nose, quite a noble and aquiline affair once, was red at the end, and querulous, like the long lean chin and reedy neck. Only the brow gave any hint that he might not be a casual loafer at a railroad station willing to carry your grip for a few pennies. High, narrow, and revealed remorselessly by the passing of the years, it was the brow of the supreme illusionist, the victim of an implacable and sinister spiritual destiny. I have said that when I saw him the previous evening he had the look of a man trying to win back into the world. Now that I saw him more clearly, he looked as though he had come back, at some frightful cost, and regretted it.

"He was listening to someone I could not see at the moment, and raising his eyes with a regularly recurring movement that was almost mechanical. I shifted a little to take in another view of the small, shabbily furnished room. Standing by the end of a sofa, on which I could see a girl's feet and skirt, was a dark young man brushing his frock coat and talking with what struck me as absurd eloquence. He had never shaved; his face was obscured in a sort of brown fungus and was blotchy about the forehead and chin. His black eyes rolled as he talked and flourished the brush. He seemed to be describing something highly creditable to himself. This, I may tell you, was Monsieur Nikitos, visible in business hours as a clerk at Grünbaum's elbow, or in a bare barn of an outer office. He came over to the table, and sitting down near Captain Macedoine, opened an account book. This was evidently a séance of the Anglo-Hellenic Development Company, I thought, and I moved back to the path. I had no desire to spy upon any of these people, you understand. I had to find Siddons, and even the intriguing amusement of watching a great illusionist had to recede before that urgent need. I regained the path below and thinking I would go down to the boat in case he had returned I started back. The torch showed me a steep descent of rubble where a cave-in had occurred, a gash in the edge of the path, I thought at first it was the way down to the jetty and I flashed the lamp steadily upon the bottom. There was someone lying down there. It was not long before I was kneeling over young Siddons.

"At first, you know, I really thought he was dead. He was lying face upward and his forehead had been gouged open above the left eye with some jagged edge and was bleeding in thick, slow runnels that disappeared into his curly hair. He lay perfectly motionless, but as I bent over him and searched the soft, delicate face in the first horror of grief, the eyes opened wide and blinked in a gaze of unconscious enquiry.

"'What is it, my boy?' I asked and after seeming to collect himself he asked, in perfect calmness:

"'Who is that?'

"'The Chief,' I answered. 'Did you fall?' He closed his eyes and made an effort to move. I put my arm around him. He said:

"'Chief, is the boat still there?' I told him it was.

"'Help me up. Be careful. I think my collar-bone is broken again. Oh, Lord! Does—does the Old Man know?'

"'It was he sent me,' I said. 'He was afraid you had had an accident. Does that hurt?'

"'No—but catch hold of me lower down, will you?'

"'How did it happen? Did you slip?'

"'Oh, Lord! Yes—slipped, you know—look out!'

"'I thought you were dead,' I said jocularly, as we reached the path.

"And under his breath he made a remark that Captain Macedoine's daughter had made to me not so many hours before.

"He said he wished he was."

CHAPTER IV

"By Jove," said Mr. Spenlove, suddenly, after a long silence, "I have often wondered what might have happened to us if young Siddons hadn't tumbled down there and smashed himself up. I mean, supposing our minds hadn't been taken off the great subject of Captain Macedoine's financial projects. Because, mind you, although I behaved in a very sagacious manner while discussing the matter with Jack and his wife, I'm not at all prepared to say that I wouldn't have submitted if Jack had urged it in his tempestuous way. The psychology of being stung is a very complicated affair. We pride ourselves on our strong, clear vision and so forth, but it is very largely bluff. We are all reeds shaken by the winds of desire. In spite of my sagacity the notion of making a fortune was alluring. When I came to think of it the idea of a few years of ruthless exploitation of the toiling inhabitants of a region for which I had no sympathy, followed by a dignified return to England with a sunny competence—say ten thousand a year, afforded an attractive field for the development of one's personality. I suppose it comes to all of us at times—a vision of ourselves with the power to expand to the utmost. And at the back of it all lay the exasperating and tantalizing thought that it might be possible. The very preposterousness of the suggestion was in its favour, in a way. The very fact that nobody else had ever thought of making a fortune out of Macedonia led one to wonder if it might not be done. You get an idea like that in your head, and it lies there and simmers and seethes, and finally boils over and you have taken the plunge. That's what might have happened, if I had not gone ashore to look for young Siddons, and accidentally beheld the great Captain Macedoine himself and his lieutenant. I don't say that the mere view of these two worthies discussing their plans was sufficient to convince me of their rascality. I'm not convinced of that even now. What I did acquire, even before young Siddons drove the whole matter into the background, was a sudden sense of proportion. To associate a golden fortune with those two shabby and cadaverous birds of prey was too much. And when we got aboard again the whole proposition seemed to have vanished into thin air.

"Of course everyone was excited. Jack had to take hold and give orders. He shut his wife and youngster up in their cabin, ordered us all out of the saloon except the steward, and set to work on young Siddons, who was lying on the table with a towel under his head. Mr. Bloom, who had been rushing to and fro making friends with the Second, the Third, and even the donkey man, in a frenzied attempt to get information about the coal which was to be sold the next day, now favoured me with a heart-to-heart talk on the subject of professional etiquette. It was a mistake, in his opinion as an experienced ship's officer, for the Captain to be a surgeon as well. It was time we took a firm stand. Owners should be informed that this primitive and obsolete state of affairs could be no longer tolerated. Now when he was sailing under the Cuban flag, they always carried a surgeon. Compelled to by law. Of course one couldn't let a man die for lack of attention; but if he was in Captain Evans' shoes, he would send in a report with a formal protest appended. Do everything courteously and in due form but—be firm! That was the trouble with sea-going officers—they were not firm with their employers. He himself, he was frank to say, had often given owners a piece of his mind, and no doubt he had suffered for it. And why? Simply because he got no support. Now he knew I wouldn't take any silly offence if he mentioned a personal matter, but really for Captain Evans to send an engineer ashore in a boat was in the highest degree unprofessional. It was a job for an executive officer, obviously. Not that he wished to criticise—far from it—but verb. sap as they say at Oxford and Cambridge. A word to the right man, mind you, was worthy any amount of useless argument with—well, he wouldn't mention any names, but I knew what he meant, no doubt.

"How long this enchanted imbecile would have continued his monologue I shouldn't care to say, if Jack had not called me down to help get young Siddons into his bunk. The collar-bone, broken more than once at football, would knit nicely, he said, and he had put a couple of neat stitches in the gash over the eye. Made him shout, Jack admitted as he washed his hands with carbolic soap, but what was a little pain compared with being disfigured for life? He reckoned it would heal up and leave no more than a faint scar. What did I reckon he was doing, eh? Funny for him to leave the boat. Very unusual. What did I think?

"'Didn't he give you any explanation?' I enquired.

"'Well, I suppose you can call it an explanation,' said Jack, 'in a way. He said he went ashore for a few minutes on a private matter, and he would appreciate it if I took his word. I'm supposed to keep the matter private, too, so keep your trap shut, Fred. Fact is,' he went on, 'it's that gel's at the bottom of it. He's one of those young fellers who take it hard when they do take it. What they call in novvels hopeless passion.'

"I was surprised at Jack's penetration. Indeed I was surprised at his allusion to what he called 'novvels' for he had never, so far as I knew, read any. Perhaps he had taken a surreptitious squint at some of the exemplary serials which Mrs. Evans affected.

"'Then you won't take any action?' I said.

"'Why should I? He's had an accident, that's all. If he'd fell down and broke his neck, it would be different. As it is, he's had a lesson. I must go up and take a look round.'

"Jack went up on deck to take a look at the mooring ropes, for the weather is treacherous in spring and autumn hereabouts, and more than once we had to slip and run out to sea. I stepped into the little alleyway on the port-side and walked along to young Siddons' room. The door was on the hook and a bright bar of light lay athwart the floor of the alleyway. He was lying on his back as we had left him, his unbandaged eye staring straight up at the deck overhead. As I opened the door and closed it behind me he turned that eye upon me without moving his head.

"'All right?' I asked, just for something to say. He made a slight gesture with his hand, signifying, I imagine, that it was nothing. His face had that expression of formidable composure which the young assume to conceal their emotions. I don't know exactly why I bothered myself with him just then. Perhaps because there is for me a singular fascination in watching the young. I won't say it is affection, because our relations are usually of the sketchiest description. Sometimes I don't know them at all. I fancy it is because one sees oneself in them surrounded by the magical glamour of an incorruptible destiny. As we say, they are refreshing, even in their griefs, and there is something in the theory that we, as we are crossing the parched areas of middle age, can draw upon their spiritual vitality to our own advantage if not to theirs.

"'Nothing you want, eh?' I said, looking round. The one bright eye stared straight up again.

"'Will you do me a favour, Chief?' he asked in a low tone.

"'Of course I will,' I answered. 'What is it?'

"'If you wouldn't mind, when you go ashore, to see Miss Macedoine and tell her I am sorry she couldn't—you see,' he broke off, suddenly, 'I said I'd see her this evening. I went up ... she wasn't there. I couldn't wait ... boat waiting, you know. Then something ... well, I fell down. Would you mind?'

"'I'll tell her,' I said. 'Is she fond of you?'

"His eye closed and he lay as motionless as though he were dead.

"'I don't suppose it matters now,' he remarked, very quietly. 'I shan't see her again, very likely. Only I thought—if you told her how it was ... you understand?'

"'I tell you what I'll do,' I replied. 'I'll ask her to come and see you. Isn't that the idea?'

"'Yes, that's the idea,' he returned with extraordinary bitterness. 'That's all it's likely to be—an idea. I never did have any luck. It's always the way, somehow. The things you want ... you can't get. And now, this ... I say, Chief.'

"'Well?'

"'Excuse me, won't you, talking like this. I'm awfully grateful really. It means a good deal to me, if she only knows I meant to be there. She said I could—if I liked.'

"'Isn't she playing with you?' I asked, harshly. He put up his hand.

"'No, she's not that sort. She's different from other girls. She's had a rotten time ... I can't tell you.... It would have been different if she was coming home with us. Everything seems against me. No matter ... a chap has to put up with his luck, I suppose.'

"'You'll pick up,' I suggested, without much brilliance I am afraid. He made no reply, lying with a sort of stern acquiescence in the enigmatic blows of fate.

"And the next day, when the ore was crashing into the holds and the ship lay in a red fog of dust, Jack and I went ashore on our business. I remember Mr. Bloom walking to and fro on the bridge deck with the Second Mate, nudging him facetiously as they passed the Second, who was rigging his tackle over the bunker, and nodding toward us as we made our way among the ore-trucks and down to the beach. The Second had told me that 'the nosey blighter' had been making inquiries about the coal, with sly innuendoes dusted over his sapient remarks. It was a subject to which Mr. Bloom's lofty conceptions of 'professional etiquette' would do full justice. As we climbed the steps which ran up outside Grünbaum's house, I was wondering to myself if I should be able to redeem my promise to young Siddons. There seemed small likelihood of it unless I took Jack into our confidence. We entered a high stone passage through the farther end of which we could see Grünbaum's orchard and Grünbaum's five children playing under the trees in the care of a fat Greek woman. We turned to the left into an immense chamber with a cheap desk and office chair in one corner. The whitewashed walls were decorated with oleographs of imaginary Greek steamships, all funnels and bridge, with towering knife-like prows cleaving the Atlantic at terrific speed. There were advertisements of Greek and Italian insurance companies, too, and a battered yellow old map of the Cyclades. And standing at the tall windows was a figure in a frock coat squinting through a telescope. He put it down hurriedly as we entered, walked across to the desk, and resting his hand on it, made us a bow. This was Monsieur Nikitos, the lieutenant of the mighty enterprise. I must confess that his pose at that moment was less of the financier than of a world-famous virtuoso at the piano bowing to a tumult of applause.

"'This is the Chief Engineer,' said Jack. The virtuoso favoured me with a special bow, and waved his hand to a couple of chairs.

"'Take a seat, Captain. Take a seat, Mister Chief. Mr. Grünbaum is engaged at the moment. I take the opportunity of mentioning the little matter we discussed yesterday, Captain. I have no doubt you will take shares in our company.'

"Jack looked at me, and I regarded Monsieur Nikitos with fresh interest. He was a most mysterious creature to look at, now we were close to him. He was quite young, not more than twenty-five, and the black fuzz on his face gave him a singularly dirty appearance. As he sat in his swivel chair with the tails of his dusty frock coat draped over the arms, tapping his large white teeth with his pen and brushing his black hair from his blotchy forehead, he suddenly gave me the impression of a poet trying to think of a rhyme.

"'We have decided,' I said, and he dropped his hands and inclined his ear, 'to think it over.' He slumped back in his chair, smiled, and shook his head. Then he straightened up and reaching for a ruler looked critically at it.

"'We cannot wait. In affairs of finance one must think quickly, then act—so!' He snapped his thumb and finger. 'If not, the chance is gone. Now I show you. To-day, Captain Macedoine resigns. Yes! To-morrow, I resign. Like that. To-morrow also, Monsieur Spilliazeza, our invaluable manager of works, resigns! To-night, the Osmanli calls for the mails. We go by the Osmanli, our vessel, to Saloniki. We arrive. We take action at once.' He waved his arms. 'Action! Next week it will be too late. Option taken up, work commenced, contracts awarded, organization complete. It is all here.' He tapped his forehead. 'I have it complete, in inauguration, here.' And he regarded us with a gaze of rapt abstraction in his brilliant black eyes.

"I don't mind telling you that the chief impression this performance made upon me was that he was a lunatic. Jack was staring solemnly at him. I imagine he began to have doubts of the wisdom of entrusting this creature with real money. And then a bell tinkled, one of a pair of high dark folding doors opened, and I had a glimpse of a great room where an enormously fat man sat in the curve of a vast horseshoe shaped desk. It was only a momentary view, you understand, of the diffused light shed by three tall windows upon a chamber of unusual size. I had an impression of glancing into a museum, a glimpse of a statue, very white and tall with an arm broken off short, gleaming glass cases of small things that shone like opals and aquamarines, and great bunches of coral like petrified foam. I saw all this as the door stood for a moment, the fezzed head of a little old gentleman looking out and mumbling the word 'Kapitan!' We stood up. Jack made a movement to go in. Monsieur Nikitos came between us and regarded us as though we were conspirators.

"'Monsieur Grünbaum will see the Kapitan,' he remarked in a loud voice, and then in a whisper, 'Of this—not a word,' And he pressed his knuckles to his lips. And then Jack passed into the room, the door closed softly, and I was alone with Monsieur Nikitos.

"My feelings at that moment, you know, were mixed. I was astonished. I was amused. I was indignant. I looked at the frock-coated figure before me with an expression of profound distaste and contempt. He gave me a confidential smile and indicated a chair. I sat down, looking at the closed folding doors. And as I sat there I became aware that Monsieur Nikitos was indulging in a whispered monologue. I caught the words—man of wide views—great wealth—vast experience—unlimited prospects—unique grasp of detail—necessary in affairs—man of affairs ... and then, in a lower tone—daughter—beauty—happiness—future—efforts redoubled—found fortunes—ideals—cannot express feelings—humble aspirations—many years—ambition—travel....

"I suppose I must have made some sound to indicate my coherent interest in this unlooked-for rigmarole, for he sprang up, and placed himself between me and the folding doors. He bent his head to my ear. He desired to know if I considered my Kapitan reliable. Would he invest? That was the thing. Would he invest? Had he character? Why did he ask? Because he had a design. The Swedish Kapitan who had invested was a single man, a man of no education, I was to understand—no culture. But my Kapitan was a married man. Of course he would settle in Saloniki, that fairest jewel in the Turkish crown. He himself knew a house in a good street—just the thing. He was anxious about this because he himself would shortly become a married man. He sat down abruptly and waved the ruler. As in a dream I sat there listening to his words. I have a notion now that he gave me his whole life history. I recall reference to—early years—great ambitions—great work—frustrated—years of exile—unique qualifications—international journalism—special correspondent—highly commended—friend of liberty—confidential agent, and so on. He had an immense command of rapidly enunciated phrases which were run together and interspersed with melodramatic pauses and gestures. And I said nothing—nothing at all. He ran on, apparently quite satisfied that I had a deep and passionate interest in his vapourings. As a matter of fact, I paid very little attention. I was wondering whether it would be worth my while to obtain an interview with the girl, if what he had hinted were true, that her assistance in her father's designs was to many this eloquent lieutenant and satisfy his 'humble aspirations.' And while I wondered I heard harsh words uttered within the folding doors—confidence in my dispositions—said a voice of grating power and guttural sound. Monsieur Nikitos looked at me for an instant and waved his ruler. He muttered. He alluded to tyrannical obstinacy—unimaginative autocracy—intolerable domination—and other polysyllabic enormities. The harsh voice went on in an unintelligible rumble, rising again to 'post of a secretarial nature—a man of undeserved misfortune—my disgust—effrontery to submit—resignation.' I listened, and Monsieur Nikitos, who was gazing at me, gradually assumed an expression of extreme alarm. He rose and went on tip-toe into the outer hall. He reappeared suddenly with a broad-brimmed felt hat on his head. He muttered some excuses—appointment—return immediately—urgent necessity—apologies—in a moment—and tip-toed away again, leaving me alone.

"I was beginning to think Jack had forgotten all about me when he came out and closed the door behind him. We walked out into the passage together, but he made no remark until I asked him if it was all right about the coal. He said yes, it was all right, but what did I think? That chap Macedoine was a wrong-un, according to Grünbaum. Trying to get control. Grünbaum had sacked him. After fetching his daughter out for him, too. It was true, what Nikitos had told us. They were going all right but because they had to. Grünbaum was in a devil of a rage over it. Had cabled to Paris to send out some more men. Good job he'd had the notion of asking Grünbaum about it, eh? Might have lost our money. Now he came to think of it, that Greek didn't look very reliable. Was I coming back on board?

"We paused on the beach, where a few fishing boats were drawn up and the nets lay in the sun drying.

"'I don't think I will,' I said. 'I guess I'll take a walk up the cliff over there. When will you pull off to the buoys?'

"'Not a minute after five,' he returned. 'It's none so safe here at night. Steam ready all the time remember, Fred. Grünbaum was just giving me a friendly warning.'

"I started off for a walk up the cliff. The point where the path cut round the corner stood sharp against the sky and led me on. As I gained the beginning of the rise I could look back and down into Grünbaum's garden where lemon, fig, plum, and almond trees grew thickly above green grass cut into sectors by paths of white marble flags and with a fountain sending a thin jet into the air. I could see children playing about under the trees, but there were no birds. There were no birds on the island. I realized this perfectly irrelevant fact at that moment, and I became aware of the singular isolation of this man living under the gigantic shadow of the mountain. It gave me a sudden and profound consciousness of his extreme security against the designs o£ imaginative illusionists. The vast bulk of the man became identified in my mind with the tremendous mass of rock against which I was leaning. The momentary glimpses into his office, the memory of the bizarre conjunction of ancient statuary with the furniture of business and money-making, the harsh voice reverberating through the lofty chambers, gave me a feeling that I had been assisting at some incredible theatrical performance. I started off again. I felt I needed a walk. After all, these reflections were but an idle fancy. Jack and I were not likely to risk our small savings in any such wild-cat schemes. Jack's words about pulling off to the buoys had recalled me to a sense of serious responsibility. One always had that hanging over one while in Ipsilon. Grünbaum, from his secure fastness under the mountain, was familiar with the incalculable treachery of the wind and sea.

"I was soon far above the habitation of men. Above me slanted the masses of weathered limestone and marble; below, reduced to the size of a child's toy, I could see the Manola. At intervals I could hear a faint rattle and another cloud of red dust would rise from her deck, like the smoke of a bombardment. Far below me were a tiny group of men at work in a quarry. They seemed to be engaged in some fascinating game. They clustered and broke apart, running here and there, crouching behind boulders, and remaining suddenly still. There would be a dull thump, a jet of smoke, and a few pieces of rock, microscopic to me, would tumble about. And then all the pigmy figures would run out again and begin industriously to peck at these pieces, like ants, and carry them, with tiny staggerings, out of sight. I watched them for a moment and then walked on until I came to the corner where the path curves to the right and eventually confronts the open sea. I was alone with the inaccessible summits and the soft murmur of invisible waves breaking upon half-tide rocks. I was in mid-air with a scene of extraordinary beauty and placidity spread before me. The sea, deep blue save where it shallowed into pale green around the farther promontory, was a mirror upon which the shadows of clouds flickered and passed like the moods of an innocent soul. In the distance lay the purple masses of other islands, asleep. It was as though I were gazing upon a beautiful and empty world, awaiting the inevitable moment when men should claim the right to destroy its loveliness....

"At intervals along the face of the cliff were tunnels which led through the marble shell of the mountain into the veins of ore. I walked along looking for a place to sit down, stepping from tie to tie of the narrow-gauge track along which the mine trucks were pushed by Grünbaum's islanders. I suppose the vein had petered out up there.... I don't know. One of Grünbaum's dispositions, perhaps. Anyhow it was deserted. I came to a huge mass of rock projecting from the face, so that the track swerved outward to clear it. I walked carefully round and stopped suddenly.

"She was sitting there, leaning against the entrance to a working, and looking out across the sea. Without alarm or resentment she turned her head slightly and looked at me, and then bent her gaze once more upon the distance. I hesitated for a moment, doubtful of her mood, and she spoke quietly.

"'What is it?' she asked. I went up and stood by her.

"'I have a message for you,' I remarked, and took out a cigarette. 'But I had no idea you were up here. In fact, I dare say I should have gone back on board without giving it to you.'

"'What is it?' she said again, and this time she looked at me.

"'You don't know, I suppose,' I said, 'that Siddons—the Third Mate—has had an accident?'

"She looked away and paused before answering.

"'I see,' she remarked, though what she saw I did not quite comprehend at the moment. It seemed a strange comment to make.

"'Oh, come!' I said. 'Don't say you're not interested.'

"'How did it happen?' she enquired, looking at her shoe.

"I told her. She turned her foot about as though examining it, her slender hands clasped on her lap. She had an air of being occupied with some problem in which I had no part.

"'And the message?' she said at length. I gave her that, too, briefly, and without any colouring of my own. She put one leg over the other, clasping her knee with her hands, and bent forward, looking suddenly at me from under bent brows.

"'What can I do?' she demanded in a low tone.

"'But don't you see,' I returned. 'He's in love with you.'

"She gave a faint shrug of the shoulders and uttered a sound of amusement.

"'Then you are indifferent?' I asked, annoyed.

"'What else can I be?' she said. 'Boys always think they are in love. I don't think much of that sort of love.' And she fell silent again, looking at the sea.

"'Look here, my dear,' I said abruptly, 'tell me about it. I'm in the dark. Can't I help you?'

"'No,' she said. 'You can't. Nobody can help me. I'm in a fix.'

"'But how?' I persisted.

"'Do you suppose,' she said, slowly, 'that nobody has been in love with me before I came on your ship? I thought you'd understand, when I told you I had never had any luck. I haven't. I had no one to tell me. I thought people were kinder, you know—men, I mean. And now all I can do is wait ... wait. Sometimes I wish I was dead, wish I'd never been born! Before you came up, I was wondering if I couldn't just jump—finish it all up—no more waiting. And then I found I hadn't the pluck to do that. I tried to tell Mrs. Evans once, give her a hint somehow, but she doesn't understand. She's safe. She's got a husband as well as ... no matter. I was going to tell you, one evening, you remember, but I got scared. I didn't feel sure about you. Oh, I'm sorry, of course, about Mr. Siddons. I liked him, you know. He's a gentleman. But even gentlemen are very much the same as anybody else.'

"'But what will you do?' I asked in astonishment.

"'I must go with my father,' she replied, stonily. 'He wants me to be with him. He is not happy here. He is misunderstood. He is going into business with my—with another man. We are going to Saloniki. I dare say I shall do as he wishes. That's what a daughter should do, isn't it?' And her eyes flickered toward me again.

"I didn't answer, and there was a long silence. I had no words of consolation for that solitary soul engaged in the sombre business of waiting. And I understood the trivial rôle which young Siddons played in her tragic experience. To her we were all pasteboard figures actuated by a heartless and irrelevant destiny. Fate had shut the door upon her with a crash, and she was alone with her griefs in an alien world. I put my arm round her shoulders. She looked at me with hard bright eyes, her red lips firmly set.

"'Can I help you?' I whispered. She shook her head. 'At least,' I went on, 'you can write to me, if you were in trouble—ever. I would like you to feel that someone is thinking of you.'

"'It's kind of you,' she said, with a faint smile, 'but you wouldn't be able to do much. Oh! I know what men are,' she added with a hysterical little laugh. 'Always thinking of themselves. There's always that behind everything they do. They don't mean it, but it's there, all the time. Even you wouldn't do anything to make yourself uncomfortable, you know.'