COMMAND

BY WILLIAM McFEE

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1922

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

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

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

First Edition

This book is inscribed to those commanders under whom the author has had the honour to serve, who have achieved firmness without asperity, tact and sympathy without interference, and appreciation without fuss. It is inscribed to these gentlemen because while they lack the gift of self-advertisement, they have contrived, in spite of the trials and exasperations of a seafaring existence, to engage the respect and affections of their lieutenants.

CONTENTS

[PREFATORY NOTE]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[CHAPTER XIV]
[CHAPTER XV]
[CHAPTER XVI]
[CONCLUSION]

PREFATORY NOTE

This tale is an original invention. It is not founded upon fact, nor are the characters herein described portraits of actual persons. The incidents and topography are imaginary.

W. M.

COMMAND

CHAPTER I

She was one of those girls who have become much more common of late years among the upper-middle classes, the comfortably fixed classes, than they have ever been since the aristocracy left off marrying Italian prime-donne. You know the type of English beauty, so often insisted on, say, twenty years ago—placid, fair, gentle, blue-eyed, fining into distinction in Lady Clara Vere de Vere? Always she was the heroine, and her protagonist, the adventuress, was dark and wicked. For some occult reason the Lady Rowena type was the fashion.

Ada Rivers was one of those girls who have come up since. The upper-middle classes had experienced many incursions. All sorts of astonishing innovations had taken place. Many races had come to England, or rather to London, which is in England but not of it; had made money, had bred their sons at the great public schools and universities and their daughters at convents in France and Belgium. These dark-haired, gray-eyed, stylish, highly strung, athletic, talented girls are phenomena of the Stockbroking Age. They do things Lady Rowena and Lady Clara Vere de Vere would not tolerate for a moment. Outwardly resembling the wealthy Society Girl, they are essentially quite different. Some marry artists and have emotional outbreaks. Some combine a very genuine romantic temperament with a disheartening sophistication about incomes and running a home. They not only wish to marry so that they can begin where their parents leave off, but they know how to do it. They can engage a competent house-maid and rave about Kubelik on the same afternoon, and do both in an experienced sort of way. They go everywhere by themselves, and to men whom they dislike they are sheathed in shining armour. They can dance, swim, motor, golf, entertain, earn their own living, talk music, art, books, and china, wash a dog and doctor him. And they can do all this, mark, without having any real experience of what we call life. They are good girls, nice girls, virtuous girls, and very marriageable girls, too, but they have a superficial hardness of texture on their character which closely resembles the mask of experience. They are like the baggage which used to be sold in certain obscure shops in London with the labels of foreign hotels already pasted on it. It follows that sometimes this girl of the upper-middle, comfortably fixed class makes a mistake in her choice. Or rather, she credits with heroic attributes a being of indifferent calibre. She realizes in him some profound but erratic emotion, and the world in which she moves beholds her behaviour and listens to her praise of her beloved with annoyance. They speak, not of a mistake of course, but of the strangeness of girls nowadays, and incompatibility of temperaments. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these affairs is the blindness of the girl's friends to her frequent superiority over the being whom she adores. She isn't good enough for him, they say. The fact is, at the time of this story, fine women were cheap in England, and gentlemen of indifferent calibre were picking up bargains every day.

Mr. Reginald Spokesly, a case in point, was accustomed to use this very phrase when in a mood in which his egotism was lying dormant. "I've picked up a bargain," he would say to himself as he leaned over the rail and watched the millions of tiny facets of the sea reflecting the sunset. "A bargain," he would whisper in an awed voice, nodding gravely at the opposite bulkhead, as he sat in his room with his feet in a bucket of hot water, for this was his way with corns. And Mr. Reginald Spokesly was intensely preoccupied with women. He had often sighed, on the bridge, as he reflected what he might do "if he only had the means." Perhaps, when he got a command.... He would halt short at this, suddenly remembering the bargain he had picked up.

But it must not be for one moment imagined, when I speak of Mr. Spokesly as being at that time a gentleman of indifferent calibre, that he was so regarded by himself or his world afloat or ashore. Indeed, he was a rather magnificent person. He played his cards very well. He "kept his ears open and his mouth shut," as he himself put it. He had once confided to Mr. Chippenham, the third officer, that "there was jobs goin' just now, soft things, too, if y' only wait." The third officer was not directly interested, for he knew well enough that he himself stood no chance in that gamble. But he was impressed by Mr. Spokesly's—the second officer's—exquisite fitness for any such jobs. Even the Old Man, taciturn, distant, and dignified as he was, was not up to Mr. Spokesly. Who had so slow and so deliberate a walk? Who could treat the common people of the ship, the sailors, the firemen, the engineers and wireless boys, with such lofty condescension? It was a lesson in deportment to see him stroll into the chief engineer's room and extend himself on that gentleman's settee. It was unfortunately true that some of those common people treated Mr. Spokesly, not as a commander in posse, not as one of those select beings born to rule, but as one of themselves. Mr. Chippenham remembered with pain one incident which showed this only too clearly. They were watching a destroyer coming into port, her decks lined with bluejackets, her three funnels belching oil-smoke, her semaphore working. As she swung round astern of them, Mr. Spokesly, who had been pacing to and fro paring his nails, joined the little group at the rail, nodding in majestic approval.

"Ah," he remarked in his loose-lipped, husky drawl, "I sh'd like to 'andle one o' them little things meself."

And to this the third engineer, his greasy arms asprawl on the rail, had looked over his shoulder and remarked:

"You! I'd like to see you! You'd pile her up on the beach before you'd had her five minutes, that's what you'd do."

It was a vile, gratuitous insult, the third officer had thought hotly, and he had watched Mr. Spokesly do the only thing possible, walk grandly away. That was the worst of those beastly engineers. If you gave them an inch they'd take a mile. And he made a mental note of what he would do when he attained to command—some twenty years ahead.

But this was, I am glad to say, an exceptional incident. Circumstances as a rule favoured the development of Mr. Spokesly's amour propre and he brooded with intense absorption upon his own greatness. Now this greatness was a very intricate affair. It was inextricably tangled up with the individual soul known as Reginald Spokesly, Esquire, of Thames Road, Twickenham, England, and the unit of the Merchant Service known as R. Spokesly, second officer, S. S. Tanganyika, a member of what is called "the cloth." Perhaps it would be better to include another manifestation of greatness, which was Mr. Spokesly's tremendous power over women. His own explanation of this last phenomenon was that he "kept them in their place." To him they were mere playthings of an idle hour. Perhaps his desire was most aroused by stories of Oriental domesticity, and he almost regretted not being born a pasha, where his abilities as a woman tamer could have had more scope. However, he did not read a great deal. In fact, he could hardly be said to read at all. He patronized a book now and then by falling asleep over it.

In the early days of the war, Mr. Spokesly's light had been hidden for some years in the Far East. Indeed, when I think of the sort of life he was gradually subsiding into out there, I sometimes wonder if he would ever have attained to such a capacity for moral effort as he afterwards displayed unless the war had evoked the illusion that he ought to go home and enlist, and so had opened to him the wealth of bargains to be picked up in England. That, at any rate, had been his ostensible reason for quitting the peculiar mixture of tropical languor and brisk modernity which had been his life for nearly four years. Perhaps it was not so much love of country as personal destiny, for Mr. Spokesly had a very real belief in his destiny. Here again his greatness, which was of course the warp and woof of his destiny, showed a pattern of perplexing intricacy. He regarded himself with approval. He was putting on weight. A vigorous man of thirty-odd, coming thousands of miles across the ocean to fight for his country! He read the roll of honour each week in the papers that met them on the homeward voyage, and the page blurred to his sight as he gazed through it into the future. You might almost, he reflected, count out those who were wounded and missing as well! Whether he had ever had any genuine intention of becoming a soldier I do not know. He had a remarkably strong instinct of self-preservation; but then many soldiers have that. As the liner neared home, however, Mr. Spokesly's thoughts centred more and more truly about himself and his immediate future. The seraglios he had quitted in Singapore and Kobe and Rangoon were, in his own words, "a thing o' the past." The time, "the psychological moment," as he phrased it without in the least knowing what the word meant, was come when he would have to marry or, at any rate, become engaged. He was not, he told himself, "pertickler." He reckoned he could fall in love with almost anybody who wasn't too old or too ugly, and providing always that she had "a dot." He was a stern believer in a dot, even though he did not know how to pronounce it. Looming behind the steep hill leading to a command were the happy mountain valleys of a comfortable independence. To marry money! Now he came to think of it, it had been the pervading ambition of his life. And here was his chance. He pulled down his vest and settled his tie as he thought of the golden future before him. He had a vision of an England full of consolable fiancées, young ladies of wealth, beauty, and position, sobbing gently for departed heroes, but willing to be comforted....

It did not turn out that way, of course. Indeed, his first experience on arrival was of an England of brisk, determined young women making munitions, clipping tickets, and conducting street cars, and he was angered at the unwomanliness of it all. Woman's place, he had always believed, was in the harem. He had held, when lying in his hammock out East and lazily reading the home news of suffrage riots, that the Government "ought to have tied some of 'em up and horse-whipped 'em." But he left the Metropolis behind as soon as possible, and went down to stay with his family at Twickenham. And it was here, on a perfect day in late autumn, that Ada Rivers, living with her married sister at Richmond, brought balm to his wounded spirit.

From the very first day, spent in a punt at Kingston, she had struck the right note of adoration. He had been telling her how his last ship had been sunk by the Emden, and was going on to say he had providentially left her just before, when she broke in ecstatically: "And you went through it all?" He hesitated for a moment, and she followed this up with, "How glorious! You have been doing your bit!" She leaned back on the cushions and gazed at him with shining gray eyes as he poled her gently along, his large hairy arms, one of them clasped by a wrist watch, outstretched above her, as though in some mystic benediction, his loose mouth and double chin pendulous with the delicious flattery. For she was a fine girl—he realized that immediately his sister had introduced him. She made him feel his masculinity. He liked to think afterwards of how deliberately he had made his choice.

He floated for a time in a dream of sensuous delight, for she was one of those girls who will obey orders, who like orders, in fact, and whose proud subservience sends a thrill of supreme pleasure through the minds of their commanders. They were soon engaged.

There was not as much difference between this courtship and that of an average coal or ice man as one might suppose. Mr. Spokesly's emotional output so far had been, if I may say so, limited. But this was all grist to Ada's mill. It was put down to the strong, deep, English sailor nature, just as his primitive methods of wooing were credited to the bluff English sailor nature. She was under an illusion all the time. All that her married sister could say was useless. The married sister was married to a man who was a woman-tamer himself in a way. He was now at the Front, where he had won a medal for extraordinary bravery, and his wife was dreading the day of his return. She used the interval of peace and quiet to warn her sister. But who can fight against an illusion? The married sister had to shrug her shoulders, and point out that Mr. Spokesly was throwing himself away on a silly chit. She admired Mr. Spokesly herself, to tell the truth, and liked to have him in the house, where he was often to be found during his six weeks' vacation. It was she who told him his was "a man's work" in a low contralto voice with a thrill in it. This was really unfair to the husband in Flanders who had displayed extraordinary bravery in holding an isolated post for goodness knows how many hours. It would not do to assert that Mr. Spokesly ever played with the idea of consoling a possible widow who already admired him. He had not sufficient imagination for this. And Ada herself was quite able to hold up her end. She made Mr. Spokesly feel not only great, but good. It was she who led him to see where his weakness lay, a success possible only to a clever girl. Unconscious of her promptings, he came to the conclusion that, to do himself justice, he must make an effort and "improve his education." When he heard the sisters rattling away in a foreign tongue he made a mental note that "he must rub up his French." The London School of Mnemonics, however, did the trick. It was just what he wanted. This school had a wonderful system of memory-training which was endorsed by kings and emperors, merchant princes and famous mezzo-sopranos. By means of this system, learned in twelve lessons, you trebled your intellectual power, quadrupled your earning power, and quintupled your general value to yourself and to the world. The system was comprised in twelve books of aphorisms, slim volumes in gray-green paper covers, daintily printed and apparently addressed straight to Mr. Spokesly's heart. First, he was told, he was capable of anything. He knew that, and with an almost physical feeling of pleasure he read on. Second, came a little story about a celebrated philosopher. Mr. Spokesly was charmed.

It must not be supposed, however, that this was all bunkum to Mr. Spokesly. It was, on the contrary, deadly earnest. Like many Englishmen of his day, he knew there was something wrong with him. He was aware of people in the world who used their brains and held clear notions about things and ideas, very much as a man groping along a foggy street is aware of a conversazione in one of the mansions. To him the London School of Mnemonics was a sound commercial proposition. In twelve lessons, by correspondence, they offered to develop his memory, stimulate his will power, and increase his salary. He had picked up the first half-dozen pamphlets in his fiancée's home. The husband of the married sister had taken the course as far as Number Six, which was: "How to Dominate Your Friends," with a chatty essay on Hypnotism and Matrimony, before leaving for Flanders and glory. Mr. Spokesly read them with an avidity unknown to him since he had spent a month in London many years before studying for his master's license. He felt on the highroad to success. He joined the London School of Mnemonics. He bought an engagement ring for Ada and a handsome bracelet for the married sister. He left them for a while, he said, "to join up." He meant to do it, too, for there is something pathetically appealing in the atmosphere of late autumn in England. It goes to the heart. It is not quite so piercing a call as the early spring, when one's very soul goes out in a mystical passionate union with the spirit of the land, but it is very strong, and Mr. Spokesly, without understanding it, felt the appeal. But at Paddington he stopped and had a drink. For all his years at sea, he was a Londoner at heart. He spoke the atrocious and barbarous jargon of her suburbs, he snuffed the creosote of her wooden streets and found it an admirable apératif to his London beer. And while the blowsy spirit of London, the dear cockney-hearted town, ousted the gentler shade of England, Mr. Spokesly reflected that neither the army nor the navy would have any use for a man of commanding powers, a man whose will and memory had been miraculously developed. The army would not do, he was sure. The navy would probably put him in charge of a tug; for Mr. Spokesly had no illusions as to the reality of the difficulties of life in his own sphere. And he had been long enough at one thing to dread the wrench of beginning at the bottom somewhere else. This is the tragic side of military service in England, for most Englishmen are not adaptable. Mr. Spokesly, for example, had gone to sea at the age of twelve. Unless he won a lottery prize he would be going to sea at seventy, if he lived so long. So he reflected, and the upshot was that he applied—quite humbly, for he had not as yet developed any enormous will power—and secured a billet as second officer on the Tanganyika. He told his people and Ada that there was "a chance of a command," which of course was perfectly true. "It is a man's work," she thrilled softly, echoing her sister, and she closed her eyes to enjoy the vision of him, strong in character, large in talent, irresistible in will power, commanding amid storms and possibly even shot and shell....

Having kept the middle watch, which is from twelve to four, Mr. Spokesly was sitting in his cabin abaft the bridge of the Tanganyika, his feet in a white-enamelled bucket of hot water, contemplating the opposite bulkhead. He was thinking very hard, according to the System of the London School of Mnemonics. The key of this system was simplicity itself. You wanted to remember something which you had forgotten. Very well; you worked back on the lines of a dog following a scent. From what you were thinking at the present moment to what you were thinking when you came in the door, which would lead you by gentle gradations back to the item of which you were in search. Very simple. Unfortunately, Mr. Spokesly, in the course of these retrograde pilgrimages, was apt to come upon vast and trackless oceans of oblivion, bottomless gulfs of time in which, as far as he could recall, his intellectual faculties had been in a state of suspended animation. The London School of Mnemonics did not seem to allow sufficiently for the bridging of these gaps. It is true they said in Lesson Three, with gentle irony, Remember the chain of ideas is often faulty; there may be missing links. Mr. Spokesly, who on this occasion was determined to remember what he was thinking of at the moment when the Old Man spoke sharply behind him and made him jump, was of the opinion that it was the chain that was often missing and that all he could discover were a few odd links! He lifted one foot out of the grateful warmth and felt the instep tenderly, breathing hard, with his tongue in one corner of his mouth, as his mind ran to and fro nosing at the closed doors of the past. What was he thinking of? He remembered it attracted him strangely, had given him a feeling of pleasant anticipation as of a secret which he could unfold at his leisure. It was ... it was.... He put his foot into the water again and frowned. He had been thinking of Ada, he recalled——Ah! Now he was on the track of it. He had been thinking not of her but of the melancholy fact communicated to him by his own sister, that Ada had no "dot," no money until her father died. Now how in the world did that come to react upon his mind as a pleasant thing? It was a monstrous thing, that he should have capsized his future by such precipitate folly! Mr. Spokesly comprehended that what he was looking for was not a memory but a mood. He had been in a certain mood as he stood on the bridge that morning about half-past three, his hand resting lightly on the rail, his eyes on the dim horizon, when the Old Man, in his irritating pink-striped pajamas, had spoken sharply and made him jump. And that mood, the product of some overnight reflections on the subject of will power, had been rising like some vast billow of cumulous vapour touched with roseate hues from a hidden sun, and he had been just on the brink of some surprising discovery, when——It was very annoying, for the Old Man had been preoccupied by a really very petty matter, after all. (The word "petty" was a favourite with Mr. Spokesly.) It had, however, broken the spell, and here he was, a few hours later, hopelessly snarled up in all sorts of interminable strings of ideas. The business of thinking was not so easy as the London School of Mnemonics made out. Lifting his feet slowly up and down, he reached out and took Lesson Number Five from the holdall (with his initials in blue) which hung above his head. As he turned the richly printed pages, a delicious feeling of being cared for and caressed stole over him. Never despair, said the Lesson gravely, Nil Desperandum. Just as the darkest hour is before the dawn, so victory may crown your toil at the least likely moment.

And so it was! With a feeling of sombre triumph, Mr. Spokesly "saw the connection" as he would have said. He saw that the importance of that lost mood lay in the petty annoyance that followed. For the Old Man had called him down about a mistake. A trifle. A petty detail. A bagatelle. It only showed, he thought, the narrowness of mind of some commanders. Now he...

But with really remarkable resolution Mr. Spokesly pulled himself up and concentrated upon the serious side of the question. There had been a mistake. It was as though the Old Man's quiet sharpness had gouged a great hole in Mr. Spokesly's self-esteem, and he had been unconsciously busy, ever since, bringing excuse after excuse, like barrow-loads of earth, in a vain attempt to fill it up. It was still a yawning hiatus in the otherwise flawless perfection of his conduct as an officer. He had made a mistake. And the London School of Mnemonics promised that whoever followed their course made no mistake. He felt chastened as he habituated himself to this feeling that perhaps he was not a perfect officer. He took his feet out of the lukewarm water and reached for a towel.

It will not do to laugh at such a discovery on the part of Mr. Spokesly. Only those who have had responsibility can be fully alive to the enormous significance of self-esteem in imposing authority upon a frivolous world. And it must be borne in mind that to Mr. Spokesly himself, at that moment, to fail in being a perfect officer was a failure in life. It was part of the creed of his "cloth" that each of them was without blemish until his license was cancelled by the invisible omnipotence of the law. It was, if you like, his ethic, the criterion of his integrity, the inexorable condition of carrying-on in his career. This ideal perfection of professional service resembles the giant fruits and immaculate fauna depicted on the labels of the canned articles—a grandiose conception of what was within. Just as nobody really believes that apples and salmon are like that and yet would refuse to buy a can without some such symbol, so Mr. Spokesly would have found his services quite unmarketable if he had discarded the polite fiction that he was, as far as was humanly possible, incapable of improvement. It was the aura, moreover, which distinguished him and all other officers from the riff-raff which nowadays go to sea and ape their betters—the parsons and surgeons, the wireless operators and engineers. They were common clay, mere ephemeral puppets, without hope of command, minions to take orders, necessary evils in an age of mechanism and high-speed commerce. It was an article of Mr. Spokesly's creed that "the cloth" should stand by each other. He was revolving this assumption in his mind as he rubbed the towel gently to and fro, and it occurred to him in his slow way that if he were to adopt the modern ideas of the London School of Mnemonics, if he were to devote every fibre of his being to forging ahead, gaining promotion, proving himself a superior article with a brain which was the efficient instrument of an indomitable will, then the obsolete idea of professional solidarity would have to go overboard. And just at that moment, with the consciousness of that petty mistake casting a shadow on his soul and the sharp rebuke of the Old Man rankling below, Mr. Spokesly was quite prepared to jettison anything that stood in the way of what he vaguely formulated as "his gettin' on." Mr. Spokesly's conceptions of advancement were of course largely but not entirely circumscribed by his profession. His allusions in conversation with Mr. Chippenham to "soft things" were understood to refer to shore jobs connected with shipping and transport. At one time the fairy-tale fortune of a shipmate who had married a shipowner's daughter had turned his thoughts that way. But not for long. Mr. Spokesly had a feeling that to marry into a job had its drawbacks. He felt "there was a string to it." And come what might, in his own hazy, amorphous fashion he desired to be captain of his soul. Had he the power at that moment of calling up Destiny, he would have made quite modest demands of her. Of course, a command, a fine large modern steamer, twin-screw, trading for choice in the Pacific, where as he knew very well a commander had pickings that placed him in a few years beyond the reach of penury at any rate.... Ada could come out. She would do justice to such a position out East. And when the war was over they could come home and have a little place up the river at Bourne End ... nothing very great, of course, but just right for Captain and Mrs. Spokesly. The dream was so very fair, so possible yet so utterly improbable, that his mouth drew down tremulously at the corners as he stared at the bulkhead. His eyes grew tired and smarted. Ah! Money! How often he had mouthed in jest that sorry proverb about the lack of money being the root of all evil! And how true it was, after all. Suddenly he stood up and became aware of someone in the alleyway outside his window. With a sense of relief, for his reflections had become almost inconveniently sombre and ingrowing, he saw it was someone he already knew in a friendly way, though he still addressed him as "Stooard."

There is much in a name, much more in a mode of address. When Archy Bates, the chief steward of the Tanganyika, turned round and hoisted himself so that he could look into Mr. Spokesly's port, their friendship was just at the point when the abrupt unveiling of some common aspiration would change "Stooard" into "Bates" or "Mister." For a steward on a ship is unplaced. The office is nothing, the personality everything. He may be the confidential agent of the commander or he may be the boon companion of the cook. To him most men are mere assimilative organisms, stomachs to be filled or doctored. Archy Bates was, like another Bates of greater renown, a naturalist. He studied the habits of the animals around him. He fed them or filled them with liquor, according to their desires, and watched the result. It might almost be said that he acted the part of Tempter to mankind, bribing them into friendship or possibly only a useful silence. It is a sad but solid fact that he nearly always succeeded.

But he liked Mr. Spokesly. One of the disconcerting things about the wicked is their extreme humanity. Archy Bates liked Mr. Spokesly's society. Without in the least understanding how or why, he enjoyed talking to him, appreciated his point of view, and would have been glad to repay confidence with confidence. He was always deferential to officers, never forgetting their potentialities as to future command. He respected their reserve until they knew him intimately. He was always willing to wait. His discretion was boundless. He knew his own value. Friends of his had no reason to regret it. That third engineer, a coarse fellow, one of the few irreconcilables, had called him a flunkey. Well, the third engineer paid dearly for that in trouble over petty details, soap, towels, and so forth. But with "gentlemen" Archy Bates felt himself breathing a larger air. You could do something with a gentleman. And Mr. Spokesly, in the chief steward's estimation, was just that kind of man. So, in the lull of activity before lunch, he came along to see if Mr. Spokesly felt like a little social diversion.

"Busy?" he enquired, thrusting his curiously ill-balanced features into the port and smiling. Mr. Bates's smile was unfortunate. Without being in any way insincere, it gave one the illusion that it was fitted on over his real face. A long, sharp nose projecting straight out from a receding brow nestled in a pomatumed and waxed moustache, and his eyes, of an opaque hazel, became the glinting centres of scores of tiny radiating lines. His chin, blue with shaving, and his gray hair carefully parted in the middle, made up a physiognomy that might have belonged either to a bartender or a ward politician. And there was a good deal of both in Archy Bates.

To the enquiry Mr. Spokesly shook his head. The steward gave a sharp look each way, and then made a complicated gesture that was a silent and discreet invitation.

"Oh, well." Mr. Spokesly shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth. The face at the window tittered so violently that the owner of it nearly lost his balance and put up a hand to support himself.

"Come on, old chap. I've got half an hour to spare."

"Oh, all right, Bates. Sha'n't be a minute."

The face, like a satiric mask, suddenly vanished.

Mr. Spokesly put on his socks and slippers and, lighting a cigarette, prepared to go along. He liked the steward, and he felt lonely. It so happened that, quite apart from his intrinsic greatness, Mr. Spokesly was very much alone on the Tanganyika. Mr. Chippenham was too young; the chief officer, a gnarled round-shouldered ancient, was too old; the commander too distant. There remained only the chief engineer, a robust gentleman who conversed hospitably on all subjects in a loud voice but invited no confidences. And it was confidences Mr. Spokesly really wanted to give. He wanted to impress his ideals and superior views of life upon a sympathetic and receptive mind. Most men are unconscious artists. Only instead of working in stone or brass or pigment, instead of composing symphonies or poems, they hold forth to their kindred spirits and paint, in what crude words they can find, the god-like beings they conceive themselves to be. Indeed, when we call a man a "hot-air merchant"; when we say "he does not hate himself," what is it save a grudging tribute to his excessive artistry? He is striving to evolve in your skeptical mind an image which can appear only by the light of your intelligent faith and liberal sympathy. He claims of you only what all artists claim of the critic—understanding. He seeks to thrill you with pleasure at the noble spectacle of himself blocked out against a sombre background of imperfect humanity. But to get the very best out of him you must become one in soul with him, and do the same yourself.

CHAPTER II

"You will be pleased to hear, sweetheart, that I have already got promotion, I am now chief officer, next to the captain. I dare say, in a short time your only will be coming home to take a command. I am persevering with the Course you gave me, and I find it a great assistance. Of course I have a great deal more to do now, especially as the last man was scarcely up to his work.... While as for the captain, I may as well tell you ..."

And so on. Mr. Spokesly wrote this letter from Alexandria, where the Tanganyika was discharging rails and machinery. He wrote it to Ada, who was staying with her family, including her married sister, in Cornwall, because of the air raids. She read it by the low roar of the autumnal seas round the Cornish coast and she was thrilled. Having written it, Mr. Spokesly dressed himself in discreet mufti and went ashore with his bosom friend, Archy Bates. His commander, walking to and fro on the bridge with his after-dinner cigar, saw them disappear between the tracks and the piles of freight. He frowned. He was no snob, but he had most explicit views about a ship's officer's relations with the rest of mankind. It was, in his opinion, infra dig to associate with a steward. He had mentioned it pointedly yet good-humouredly one day, and at his amazement Mr. Spokesly had replied that he would please himself in a private matter. Captain Meredith had been so flabbergasted at this wholly unexpected turn of the conversation that he said no more. Later he put it down to swelled head. Yet what else could be done? Mr. Spokesly had a master's certificate and the third mate had none at all. Captain Meredith began to muse regretfully upon the loss of his chief officer. For although Mr. Spokesly had omitted to mention it, the immediate cause of his promotion was the sudden death at sea of his predecessor. That gnarled and taciturn being, whose round moon-face had relapsed with age to the consistency of puckered pink parchment, had been for many years "taking care of himself." In that remote epoch when he was young it may be doubted whether he had done this, for he bore the marks of a life lived to the very delirious verge. That was long before Mr. Spokesly had got into short pants, however. Mr. McGinnis took care of himself day and night. He had achieved a miraculous balance of forces within his frame, a balance which enabled him to stand his watch on the bridge and give orders to the bo'sun, but no more. He would pass with a stealthy quietness along the deck and into his room, and there sit, his claw-like hands on the arms of his chair, his emaciated form encased in a diamond-patterned kimono, his pink jaws working noiselessly on a piece of some patent chewing gum, of which he carried a stock. Sometimes he read a page or two of a quiet story, but usually he switched off the electric and sat chewing far into the night. At a quarter to four one morning, the Asiatic sailor who came to arouse him discovered him hanging by his arms to the edge of his bunk, as though crucified, his appallingly thin limbs sprawling and exposing tattooings of astonishing design and colouring, his jaw hanging, his sunken eyes staring with senseless curiosity at a spot on the carpet. The Japanese sailor went back to Mr. Spokesly, who was on watch on the bridge, and reported impassively, "Chief mate all same one stiff." Mr. Spokesly was incredulous, though he knew from experience the uncanny prescience of the Oriental in such matters. "What? Sick?" he inquired in a whisper. The Japanese, a diminutive white wraith in the profound gloom of the bridge, replied, "No sick. All same one stiff. No can do." This was his final word. Mr. Spokesly hurriedly aroused the captain, who came out on the bridge and told them to go down together. They went down and Mr. Spokesly had a violent shock. He told Archy Bates afterwards he had "had a turn." He did all that a competent officer could do. He spoke sharply the man's name. "Mr. McGinnis!" and Mr. McGinnis continued to regard the spot on the carpet with intense curiosity. He felt the breast, held a shaving glass to the lips of the silent McGinnis, and realized that the Oriental who stood by the door, his dark face impassive and his gaze declined upon the floor, was perfectly right. As Mr. Spokesly raised the stiffened arms the kimono fell open, and he had another violent shock, for Mr. McGinnis had evidently been a patron of the art of tattooing in all its branches. His arms and torso formed a ghastly triptych of green and blue figures with red eyes. Contrasted with the pallor of death the dreadful designs took on the similitude of living forms. With a movement of hasty horror Mr. Spokesly laid the body on the settee and went away to call Mr. Chippenham and the chief steward.

The conjectures which followed were most of them beside the mark. The fact was, intelligence has its limits. The miraculous balance of forces had been in some obscure way disturbed, and Mr. McGinnis, like the one-hoss shay, had simply crumbled to dust at the appointed time. Captain Meredith was sorry, for Mr. McGinnis had been what is known as "a good mate." And Captain Meredith, whether from mere prejudice or genuine conviction, was unable to discern the makings of a "good mate" in Mr. Spokesly. It was almost miraculous, he reflected, how the work of the ship had got balled up since the invaluable McGinnis, neatly sewed up in some of his own canvas, had made a hole in the Mediterranean. It should be understood that Captain Meredith was a humane man. He was also a seafaring man. The fact that McGinnis had been excommunicated from the church of his baptism did not deter Captain Meredith from reading the burial service over him. And his annoyance at seeing his new chief officer and the steward "as thick as thieves," as he put it, was really a humane feeling. He had served in ships where the commander had been utterly at the mercy of some contemptible dish-washer who had wormed himself into his superior's confidence, acting perhaps as a go-between in some shady deal. He had seen a veteran shipmaster, a man of fine presence and like no one so much as some retired colonel of guards, running ignominiously along the quay to fetch back a dirty little half-breed steward, who had seen fit to take offence and who knew too much. Captain Meredith had seen these things, and though he kept them locked up in his own breast he did not forget them. He was perfectly well aware of the precarious hold most of us have upon honour. He knew that a certain austerity of demeanour was the only practicable armour against many temptations.

But of course Captain Meredith couldn't be expected to understand Mr. Spokesly's state of mind. Mr. Spokesly didn't understand it himself. It was scarcely sufficient to say that his promotion had carried him away. Far from it. He regarded this step as merely a start. What had inspired him at the moment to "stand up to the Old Man" was nothing less than a wave of genuine emotion. You see, he really liked Archy Bates so far as he knew him then. They were real chums, telling each other their grievances and sharing a singularly identical opinion of the Old Man's fitness for his job. There are more unions of souls in this world than materialists would like us to believe. What Captain Meredith mistook for harsh and ill-timed impudence was really a thickness of utterance and a sudden vision of injustice. Once done, and the Old Man reduced to an amazed silence, the incident took in Mr. Spokesly's mind a significance so tremendous that he hardly knew what to think. He had "tackled the Old Man"! He had broken the spell of a lifetime of silent obsequiousness to a silly convention. After all ... And, moreover, it took will power to do it. He was improving. The London School of Mnemonics had achieved another miracle. He went over it all again in Archy Bates's cabin, Archy's ear close to his mouth, door shut, curtains folded across the window. You never can tell who's listening on a ship.... "I turns an' says to him, 'Look here, Captain'..." Archy listening with intensity, his shoulders hunched, his opaque, agate-like eyes glittering on each side of his long sharp nose, while his thumb and forefinger slowly and repeatedly thrust back his pomatumed and waxed moustache from his lips, and breathing "Jus' fancy!... And you told him that?... Goo' Lord!... Well, I always knew 'e 'ad no use for me...." Mr. Spokesly pulled Archy Bates close up to him so that his lips were actually funnelled in the other's ear and breathed back: "Take it from me, Archy, he ain't fit for his job!"

Archy Bates had risen, just then, to get the corkscrew. He was profoundly moved, and actually found himself trying to open a bottle of whiskey with a button-hook. He showed his idiocy to Mr. Spokesly. "Jus' fancy. I don't know what I'm doin', straight." And they both laughed. But he was profoundly moved. He was preoccupied with the possible developments of this tremendous affair. Mr. Spokesly, by virtue of that last insane whisper, had of course delivered himself over, body, soul, and spirit, to the steward, but Mr. Spokesly was a friend of his. He had quite other plans for Mr. Spokesly. He stared harder than the job warranted as he put the bottle between his knees and hauled on the corkscrew. Pop! They drank, and the act was as a seal on a secret compact.

And it was that—a compact so secret that even they, the parties to it, were scarcely conscious of the pledge. But as the days passed, days of hasty clandestine comparing of grievances in each other's rooms, days of whispering apart, days followed by nights of companionship ashore, each realized how necessary was the other to his full appreciation of life. Archy Bates found Mr. Spokesly a tower of strength and a house of defence. If any complaint sounded in his presence concerning stores, Mr. Spokesly was silent for a space and then walked away. Only that vulgar third engineer was insensible to the superb reproof. "There goes the flunkey's runner," he remarked, in execrable taste, and Mr. Spokesly was obliged to ignore him. On the other hand, Mr. Spokesly found in Archy Bates a sympathetic soul, a wit that jumped with his own and understood without tedious circumlocution "how he felt about it." More precious than rubies is a friend who understands how you feel about it. He found in Archy a gentleman who was master of what was to Mr. Spokesly an incredible quantity of ready cash. At first Mr. Spokesly had apologetically borrowed "half a quid till to-morrow, being short somehow," and Archy had scorned to split a sovereign. In some way only partially understood by Mr. Spokesly as yet, certain eddies of the vast stream of gold and paper which was turning the wheels of the war swirled into the pockets of Archy Bates. He had it to burn, as they say. It was bewildering in its variety. British, American, French, Italian, Greek, Egyptian, and Japanese notes were rolled into one inexhaustible wad. More bewildering even than this was Archy Bates's uncanny command of gold. It was extraordinary how this impressed Mr. Spokesly. At a time when sovereigns and eagles and napoleons had practically vanished from the pockets of the private citizen, Archy Bates had bags of them. And like his paper currency, it was of all nations. Ten-rouble Russian pieces, twenty-drachma Greek pieces, Australian sovereigns, and massive Indian medals worth twenty dollars each, chinked and jingled against the homelier coinage of France and England. "Business, my boy, business!" he would explain with a snigger when he met Mr. Spokesly's rapt gaze of amazement. Very good business, too, the latter thought, and sighed. But there was one point about Archy which distinguished him from many owners of gold. He spent it. There lay the magic of his power over Mr. Spokesly's mesmerized soul. He spent it. Mr. Spokesly saw him and helped him spend it. Those princely disbursements night after night in Alexandria postulated some source of supply. And night after night Mr. Spokesly, pleasantly jingled with highballs and feminine society, felt himself being drawn nearer and nearer the mysterious source from which gushed that cosmopolitan torrent of money. Mr. Spokesly was in the right mood for the revelation. He was serious. He was a practical man. He needed no London School of Mnemonics to teach him to cultivate a man with plenty of money. When he and Archy Bates had walked quickly away from the ship and passed the guard at Number Six Gate, they could scarcely be recognized by one who had seen them an hour before, Mr. Spokesly silently munching his dinner under the Old Man's frown, Archy in his pantry, encased in a huge white apron, bending his sharp nose over the steaming dishes, and communicating in violent pantomime with the saloon waiter.

Now they stood side by side, brothers, magnificently superior to all the world. A dingy carriage rattled up and Archy waved it away impatiently. Another, with two horses and rubber tires, was hailed and engaged. "Might as well do the thing well," said Archy, and Mr. Spokesly agreed in every fibre of his soul. And it was the same with everything else. "My motto is," said Archy, "everything of the best, eh? Can't go far wrong then. He-he!" The third engineer, vulgarian that he was, would have laughed a shrill, derisive cackle had he heard that speech. The third engineer was under the illusion that only the virtuous have ideals. He was wrong. Archy Bates's profession of faith was sincere and genuine. He had an instinct for what he called the best, which was the most expensive. What else could be the best? A love of elegance and refinement was very widespread in those days of high wages and excessive profits. Archy's wife (for he had a wife and three children in a suburb of Liverpool) was rapidly filling her instalment-purchased home with costly furniture. Only a month ago a grand piano had been put in, and she had had the dining-room suite reupholstered in real pigskin. Mr. Spokesly knew all this and it almost unmanned him to think that he was on the way to this eldorado. One night, soon after their arrival in Alexandria, Archy had hinted there was no reason why he, Mr. Spokesly, shouldn't be "in it," too. This was late in the evening, when they were seated on a balcony high above the glitter and noise of the Boulevard Ramleh, a balcony belonging to a house of fair but expensive reception, of which Archy was a munificent patron. Archy, after two bottles of whiskey, had become confidential. He had hinted that his friend Reggie should be "put next" the business which produced such amazing returns. Reggie had waited to hear more but, with amusing inconsequence, Archy had changed the subject, relapsed indeed into a tantalizing dalliance with a lady friend.

But to-night, in sober earnest, for Archy had had little besides a bottle of gin since rising in the morning, he proposed that they should join a business friend of his, and have a quiet little dinner somewhere. Mr. Spokesly was all eyes, all ears, all intelligent receptiveness. He enquired who the business friend might be, and Archy, who had his own enthusiasms, let himself go. His friend, Jack Miller, had been out there for years. With Swingles, the ship-chandlers. Occupied, Archy surmised, a very high position there. Had worked himself up. Plenty of skippers did business with Swingles simply because Jack was there. If he liked to leave, Archy hadn't any doubt he'd take a good half of Swingles' business with him. Knew all the languages, French, Greek, Arabic, and so on. Kept his own hours, went in and out as he liked. Archy only wished he had Jack Miller's job!

Mr. Spokesly listened greedily. As they debouched upon the great Place Mohammed Aly, with its myriads of lights and sounds, its illuminated Arabic night signs, its cracking of whips and tinkling of bells and glasses, its gorgeous, tessellated platoons of café tables, he took a deep breath. He felt he was upon the threshold of a larger life, inhaling a more invigorating air. It seemed to him he was about to quit the dreary humdrum world of watch-keeping and monthly wages for a region where dwelt those happy beings who had no fixed hours, who made money, who had it "to burn," as they say.

And Jack Miller, whom they met that night and many nights after, was a magnificent accessory of the illusion. He was a dapper little man in fashionable clothes, a runner for a local ship-chandler, who introduced them to half-a-dozen ship-captains of a certain type, and together they went round the vast tenderloin district of the city. Mr. Spokesly was conscious of a grand exaltation during the day when he recalled his nightly association with these gentlemen. There were others, dark-skinned Greeks and Levantines in long-tasselled fezes, who joined them in their pursuit of pleasure in the great blocks of buildings behind the Boulevard Ramleh and their jaunts, in taxicabs, to San Stefano. They were, as Archy put it, over whiskey and soda in his cabin, gentlemen worth knowing, men with property and businesses. And it was one of these, one evening on the balcony of the Casino at San Stefano, who mentioned casually that he often did business with Saloniki and that if Mr. Spokesly ever had any little things to dispose of on his return, he would be glad to make him an offer, privately, of course. He often did this with Mr. Bates, he added, to their mutual satisfaction. Mr. Spokesly was charmed.

And Captain Meredith, walking the upper bridge and seeing a good deal more than either Mr. Spokesly or Mr. Bates imagined, wondered how it would all end. Indeed, Captain Meredith did a good deal of wondering in those days. He saw the wages going steadily up and up, and discipline and efficiency going, quite as steadily, down and down. Here was this young sprig Chippenham, his acting second officer, a boy of nineteen with no license and no experience, pertly demanding more money. Captain Meredith recalled his own austere apprenticeship in sail, his still more austere gruelling as junior officer in tramps, the mean accommodation, the chill penury, the struggle to keep employed, and he smiled grimly. He had his own private views of the glory of war; but apart from this, he wondered greatly what the final upshot of it all would be for the Merchant Service in general and Mr. Spokesly in particular. For he could not help regarding his chief officer as a brother of the craft. He himself had received no illumination from the exponents of modern thought. He had never been impressed by the advertisements of the London School of Mnemonics, for example. He was so old-fashioned as to imagine that to get on, a man must work hard, study hard, live hard, and stand by for the chance to come. Mr. Spokesly, he knew quite well, had been through the same mill as himself, only some ten years or so later. He regarded him, therefore, as he could never regard Mr. Chippenham, for example, who had never been in sail and who didn't know an oxter-plate from an orlop-beam. As far as the natural shyness and taciturnity of Englishmen would allow him, he was anxious for Mr. Spokesly to do well. The man was singularly fortunate, in his opinion, to be chief mate so soon. In nine or ten years, perhaps, he would have the experience to warrant the owners' giving him a command. Provided, of course, that he stuck to his business and took an interest in the fortunes of the firm. It will be seen from this that Captain Meredith was a hopeless conservative and reactionary. One of his brother-captains whom he met at dinner ashore one evening actually told him so. "Why," said this gentleman as he held a match to Captain Meredith's cigar, "why, my chief officer told me to my face the other day that there was nothing in experience nowadays. One man was as good as another, he said, so long as he had his master's ticket. Yes! A fact!" Captain Meredith was aware, too, that his ideas concerning conscientious achievement and enthusiasm for one's employers were equally archaic. The young men of to-day seemed to regard their jobs with dislike and their employers with suspicion. Their sole obsession seemed to be money. He had had pointed out to him an intoxicated youth who was causing a disturbance in a hotel bar, a youth going out East to a ship as third officer at two hundred dollars a month, they said. And the tale was received by every junior officer in the harbour with hushed awe, although it was obvious that the object of their envy would probably be laid aside with delirium tremens before he could reach his billet. Captain Meredith noticed, too, that men who were engrossed in their work were rated "queer" and as back numbers. Even among captains he sensed a reluctance to discuss a professional problem. The third engineer, a skilled mechanic with a tongue like a rasp, and the second, a patient old dobbin who ought to have been promoted long ago, were examples of an older school, but the good captain was hardly in a position to appraise them professionally.

It was different with Mr. Spokesly. If anything happened to Captain Meredith himself, a sudden weight of responsibility would roll upon Mr. Spokesly that would, in the captain's opinion, crush him. For it must be confessed that licenses, diplomas, certificates, or whatever you call your engraved warrants to ply your trade, are no guarantee of character and nerve. Nor does efficiency in a subordinate capacity imply success in command. Just as some men are stormy and intractable nuisances until they reach the top, when they immediately assume a mysterious and impregnable composure, so others deliberately avoid rising above a comfortable mediocrity, conscious of their own limitations and well satisfied that some other human soul should endure the pangs of the supreme decision. Others there are, and Captain Meredith believed Mr. Spokesly was one of them, who lack knowledge of themselves, and who have not sufficient intelligence either to carry the burden or to refuse it.

This, of course, was not Mr. Spokesly's opinion as time went on. On the contrary, he had come to the conclusion that it was no use being a smart officer "if the captain wouldn't back a man up." He told Archy Bates that "the Old Man was doing all he knew to do him dirty." And Archy riposted at once with evidence that he himself was the victim of a foul conspiracy between the Captain and the crew over the grub. Mr. Spokesly would go out on deck from these pow-wows feeling very happy, for Archy never failed to open a bottle. Mr. Spokesly would sway a little as he walked forward to see how the work was going on in the fore-hold. The Tanganyika, having discharged most of her cargo, was now reloading a great deal of it in obedience to orders from certain invisible but omnipotent beings higher up. He would sway a little, and hold on to the hatch coaming, looking down upon the toilers below with an air of profound abstraction. Then he would move gently until he could raise his eyes and sweep a casual glance in the direction of the bridge. Sometimes he would see the Old Man's head as he strode to and fro. On one occasion he "caught 'im at it," as he told Archy. "Yes, he was spying on me. Watching me. See his game? I tell you, Archy, it makes a man sick. Fancy havin' to work under a man like that. Watchin' me. Now he'll write home to the owners in his confidential report. Well, let him. Thanks to you, I got more than one egg in the basket. Sometimes, I feel inclined to go and demand my discharge. I would, only it's war time. Got to carry on in war time."

Archy Bates nodded over his glass and dipped his long sharp nose into it before making an audible reply. "Me, too!" he said, setting the glass down empty. "Me, too! If it wasn't for the war and everybody having to do their bit, I'd swallow the anchor to-morrow."

And they sat for a moment in silence, each honestly believing the other, and thinking poignantly of home. Over the steward's bunk, stuffed into a corner of the frame that enclosed his wife's portrait, was a photograph of a girl, stark naked save for a wrist watch and a feather in her black hair, sitting on Archy's knee. From behind this Mrs. Bates's thin face and flat bosom peeped out, and her eyes seemed to be fixed thoughtfully upon the two exiled patriots who sat with up-lifted glasses before her.

And on one occasion, Mr. Spokesly, who was spending the evening on board because steam had been raised for sailing, and because the owners had a tyrannical rule to that effect—Mr. Spokesly had a dream. He confessed to Archy that in common honesty he didn't know whether he was awake or asleep. A sort of vision! He was lying on his bunk with one of the manuals of the London School of Mnemonics in his hand which he was, he imagined, reading. It was an essay on "Concentration," and perhaps his thoughts had wandered a bit.... Anyhow, as he lay there, in among his thoughts slipped a new and alien impression that there was somebody in the room. He didn't turn his head, but just lay on in contemplation of this possibility. Perhaps he had half-closed his eyes, for the instructions how to concentrate included a note that the brain worked better if you lay down and shut out the distracting phenomena of existence. Everything was soft and hazy at the time. The notion that someone was there and yet not there intrigued him. And even a physical change, a faint movement of the air caused by somebody altering his position in space, a faint access of minute sounds entering by a cleared doorway, did not rouse his suspicions. On the contrary, he must have dozed, he told Archy solemnly. For the next thing he remembered with any approach to coherence was a figure with its back to him, standing by the toilet shelf, holding up an empty glass and smelling it.... A figure he knew. Yes, he nodded to Archy, who clicked his teeth and threw up his head, it was the Old Man. And as swiftly as it had come, it was gone. Mr. Spokesly found himself up on one elbow, pressing thumb and forefinger into his eyes, and then peering from the brightness of the light above his head into the rose-shaded twilight of the cabin. There was no one there. Everything was just the same. The glass was still there on the mahogany shelf, exactly as he had left it after taking a tot of whiskey before lying down. Now wasn't that a curious experience, he demanded?

But Archy was no votary of psychic phenomena. He waved everything of that sort clean out of existence. What time was it? Quarter-past eight? Why, he saw the Old Man himself sneaking up the saloon stairs to the chart-room about that time. Of course it was the Old Man. Just the sort of game he would be up to. It was revolting. Only the other day he had given orders for his own supply of spirits to be put in his bedroom instead of leaving it in Archy's charge. Never said a word to him, mind you! Told the second steward to tell the chief steward. See the game? Couldn't speak out like a man and say he'd missed a bottle or so. Justice? There is no such thing as justice when you work for an underhand, sneaking, spying....

Archy Bates had stopped short in his catalogue of the captain's deformities as though he had been suddenly throttled. A bell was buzzing in the pantry. They looked at each other. Archy put down his glass, listened for a moment, hissed venomously, "That's him!" and slipped out. Mr. Spokesly sat still while his friend was away answering the summons, and nursed the rage in his heart to a dull glow. At times it died out and he shivered as before a blackened fire, the dead ashes of a moody disgust of life. One of the tragedies of mediocrity is the confused nature of our emotions. We are like cracked bells, goodly enough in outward form and fashion, but we don't ring true. Our intelligence shows us many things about ourselves but fails to evoke a master passion. In Mr. Spokesly's case, his great desire to have riches did not obscure from his gaze the austere beauties of rectitude and the slow climb to an honourable command. Neither did it narrow down his interests to the sordid goal to which he aspired. The boding apprehension which was rising like a black cloud at the back of his mind, that he was neglecting his work, only reflected and magnified the blaze of his resentment. What encouragement had he, he would like to know. Here he was, slaving away, and no satisfaction. Nothing he did was right. Spied on! Ignored! Treated like a dog! Well, he would see. If this little business of Archy's came off, he would see if he was going to be trodden on by any shipmaster. Archy....

For a moment the clear vision of Archy obsequiously waiting on the captain, getting him some hot water perhaps, or laying out a fresh suit of underwear, troubled the darkness of Mr. Spokesly's ruminations. A clear vision, such as even the mediocre have at times. And close to it, as though another miniature in another oval frame, a sharp, clear-cut memory of Ada Rivers looking up at him with gray adoring eyes, the proud tremble of her passionate mouth, the curve of her white throat....

Mr. Spokesly rose to his feet and he caught sight of the naked girl sitting on Archy's knee, and of the bourgeois little face looking out from behind it. Archy's wife! A long dizzy wave of revulsion made Mr. Spokesly feel momentarily faint and he clutched the edge of the bunk board. For a moment he stood, slack-mouthed and moody-eyed, gazing at the photographs. Then he turned away and crept softly along the corridor.

Archy was surprised, on his return, to find him gone.

CHAPTER III

Much of the diversity and nearly all the bitterness of our lives are due to the fact that only rarely do we encounter our exact contemporaries. In any sphere where all start at a prescribed age, as in great universities and public services, there is a tendency to become standardized, to be only one example of a prevalent type. Ambition is coördinated, jealousy is neutralized; and the hot lava-flow of individualist passion cools and hardens to an admirable solidity and composure. One's exact contemporaries are around in throngs. One has no misgivings, no heartburn, no exasperation with fate. The fortunate being whose destiny lies this way takes on the gravity, the immobility, and the polish of an antique statue. The common people pass him as they pass the Elgin marbles—without emotion; but they are aware subconsciously of the cold pure beauty of outline, the absolute fidelity to type, which is the melancholy justification of his existence.

But the common people themselves are not like that. They quit their exact contemporaries at school and thence-forth are out upon the sea of life with men of all ages and breedings and nationalities around them and pressing them hard. They act and are reacted upon. Most of them nurse a secret grievance. Very few of them have any code of honour beyond law and decency. They are very largely needy adventurers, living by their wits, and are ready to pay money to those who profess to show them how they can increase their incomes, or obtain a pension, or "better their positions," or cure themselves of the innumerable physical disabilities which their fatuous ignorance and indolence have brought upon them. They love to decipher word competitions, football competitions, racing competitions. They have the high-binder's passion for getting something for nothing, his dislike to real work. And this lack of contemporary associates, this rough-and-tumble aspect of the world, induces them to regard their vices as virtues and themselves as oppressed helots struggling under the iron heels of those whom mere luck and cunning have placed in authority over them. The London School of Mnemonics was making a hundred thousand pounds a year net profit out of these people in England alone. Even the grim witticism of the company promoter, that there is "a sucker born every minute," seems inadequate to account for so monstrous a simplicity of soul. The fact is, the very boldness of the trick rendered it easy. You paid your guinea, and in due course, in due secrecy, and under duly sworn promises to divulge no hint of their contents to a living soul, you received a number of refined-looking pamphlets containing a couple of thousand words each. You thrilled as you joined in the game. Even Captain Meredith, sitting in his chart room and looking through Number Four, which Mr. Spokesly had inadvertently left on the table, was tickled by the subtle atmosphere of the style. This, he divined, was the newly discovered rapid-transit route to the Fortunate Isles, and his expression hardened to rigid attention as his eye fell on the testimony of "a ship's officer." This gentleman had risen from the humble position of fourth officer to the command "of one of our largest liners" in the miraculously brief period of eighteen months, and ascribed this success entirely to the lessons of the London School of Mnemonics. Captain Meredith felt he would like to have a talk with this person; but his mind became preoccupied with another aspect of the case. Here, he felt, lay the explanation of a good deal of Mr. Spokesly's recent behaviour. Captain Meredith was fully aware of the perilous nature of an unmarried man's life between thirty and forty. He himself had married at thirty-four, having been frankly terrified by the spiritual difficulties which he beheld surrounding a continued celibacy when combined with a life of responsible command at sea. And as he sat back on the settee of his chart-room and looked out over the top of Pamphlet Number Four at the steel-blue waters of the Mediterranean, he became dimly aware of Mr. Spokesly's condition. He could not have set down in ordered phrases the conclusions at which he was arriving; a ship's captain in time of war has not the leisure to reduce psychological phenomena to their ultimate first principles; but he was not far wrong in muttering, inaudibly, that "the man was rattled." It was this tendency to try and understand his officers which lay at the back of his leniency towards Mr. Spokesly, a leniency which Mr. Spokesly himself, in later, saner moments, found it difficult to comprehend.

Mr. Spokesly had "pulled himself together," as he expressed it, when they went to sea. Archy Bates tacitly retired into the background. Archy himself was fully aware that the bosom friendliness of the days and nights in harbour could not continue at sea, and Mr. Spokesly ceased to share the never-ending refreshment without which Archy could no longer support existence. Mr. Spokesly felt better at once, for alcohol had no real hold upon his system. He toiled laboriously through the astonishing physical exercises which the London School of Mnemonics artfully suggested were an aid to mental improvement. He practised Concentration, Observation, and something the pamphlets called Intensive Excogitation, which nearly made him cross-eyed. Incidentally, he gathered incongruous scraps of information about Alcibiades, Erasmus, Savonarola, Nostradamus, Arminius Vámbéry, and Doctor Johnson. It was while he was busy carrying out their instructions for accurate observation, that Captain Meredith asked him, calmly enough, if he had noticed that the binnacle of Number Two lifeboat was smashed and useless. Mr. Spokesly assumed a mulish expression and said, No, he hadn't. Well, in future, he was to have the boats not only made ready, but kept ready, quite ready, all the time. Mr. Spokesly, looking still more mulish, said he'd attend to it.

With the gimcrack little sheet copper binnacle in his hand, Mr. Spokesly made his way to the chief engineer's room. He felt rather bitter. Here he'd been going along nicely for two whole days and now this happens! Spoken to like a dog over a little petty thing like this. As if it was his fault the blamed thing had got smashed. Did he notice it! As if the chief officer of a ship had no more to do than moon round the deck, looking at things....

If Captain Meredith had told Mr. Spokesly that he himself had achieved a rung in the ladder by the simple process of paying very strict attention to his boats, it would have been the bare truth, but Mr. Spokesly would not have seen the point. He found the chief engineer standing before his desk in some deshabille, filling a black briar. His broad, hairy torso was almost naked, for the scanty singlet was torn under the arms and ripped across the bosom. His high-coloured features and reddish moustache were smeared with black oil, and he was breathing in heaves as though he had been running. When Mr. Spokesly presented his broken binnacle the chief glanced at it with a scarcely perceptible flicker of his bushy eyebrows and continued to fill his pipe from a canister on the desk.

"Well, Mr. Spokesly," he remarked in a voice suitable for addressing an immense open-air meeting. "Well, what is it now?" And he struck a match and lit his pipe.

Mr. Spokesly explained that he wanted it mended.

"Oh, you want it mended. Well, why don't you ship a tinker, my fine fellow? Eh? Why not indent for a tinker? You've got a carpenter and a lamp trimmer and a bo'sun and a squad of quartermasters. What's a tinker more or less?" And sitting back in his swivel chair and blowing great clouds, he looked maliciously at Mr. Spokesly. The chief was a man with an atmosphere. He had an immense experience, which he kept to himself save at the hour of need. He had an admirable staff who did just what he wanted without any rhetoric. Save at times like the present moment, when Mr. Spokesly, though he was quite unaware of it, was very much de trop owing to a breakdown in the engine room, the chief was a tolerant and breezy example of the old school. Just now, with the sweat cooling on his back and a battered binnacle offered to him for repair, he took refuge in dry malice. He studied Mr. Spokesly mercilessly. He was, or at any rate he looked, perfectly aware of the extreme unfitness of Mr. Spokesly's bodily frame, for Mr. Spokesly had done no real work since he had passed for second mate eleven years before. The chief himself was inclined to obesity, for he verged on fifty and his frame was of the herculean type, needing much nourishment and upholstery. But there was a difference between the huge, red-freckled and hirsute masses upon his bones and the soft puffiness of Mr. Spokesly's fatty degeneration. The latter's double chin was in singular contrast with the massive and muscular salience that gave the chief's face an expression of indomitable vigour. He sat there, tipping himself slightly back in his swivel chair, looking quizzically at Mr. Spokesly through the tobacco smoke. Mr. Spokesly was annoyed. The chief had always been a decent sort, he had imagined, and here he was jibbing at a little thing like this. After all, it was the engineer's business to do these things. He, an officer, couldn't be expected to attend to petty details.... A short figure with a towel over his naked shoulders appeared abruptly out of the engine room and passed along the alleyway. The chief called in his stentorian tones, which issued from between twisted and broken teeth, "Hi, Mr. Tolleshunt, here's a job for ye. Mate wants a binnacle fixed." And Mr. Spokesly's mind became easy. A voice from behind a slammed door said that the mate could take his binnacle and chase himself round the deck with it, and the chief cackled. Mr. Tolleshunt came out of his room again on his way to the bathroom. He was a young man with a thick white neck, and black eyes set in a dirty, dead-white face which bore an expression of smouldering rage. This, however, was merely an index of character which, like many such indexes, was misleading. Mr. Tolleshunt was not ill-tempered, but he had a morbid passion for efficiency. He was an idealist, with a practical working ideal. He was not prepared to accept anything in the world as an adequate substitute for achievement. He had seen through Mr. Spokesly at once, for your idealist is often a clairvoyant of character. And as he passed along to his bath, his black eyes smouldered upon the chief officer, who remembered the many insults he had swallowed from this dirty engineer, and hated him. Suddenly Mr. Tolleshunt paused, with his hand on the bathroom door, and looked back. His dead-white face, the firm modelling of cheek and chin curiously exaggerated by the black smears of grease, broke into a grim smile as he spoke.

"Say, d'you know who I am, Mister?" he asked, and added, "I'll tell ye. I'm the Thorn in the Flesh," and he disappeared into the bathroom, whence came the rumble of water being boiled up by steam. Mr. Spokesly's eyes returned to the burly gentleman who was regarding him with amusement. Mr. Spokesly threw up his hands.

"Well," he said, looking stonily at nothing, "there it is. I was told to get it fixed, an'——"

"Fix it then," said the chief quietly. Mr. Spokesly almost bridled.

"Not my work," he muttered.

"Oh, I see; it's mine, you mean!" surmised the other in a tone, of assumed enlightenment.

"It's engineer's work," said Mr. Spokesly irritably. The chief made no reply for a moment, merely studying Mr. Spokesly intently.

"See here, Mister," he began, and reached out a huge hand to close the door. "See here, Mister, you're under a misapprehension. Now I'll tell you the whole trouble. You heard Mr. Tolleshunt just now. D'ye know what he meant when he said he was the Thorn in the Flesh? It's a joke of ours in the mess room. He meant your flesh. And the reason for that is that you men up on the bridge are in a false position. Ye have executive power without knowledge. Ye command a ship and what do ye know about a ship? To whom do ye come for help, whether it is steering or driving or discharging or salving or anything? You want the same consideration and power that you have on a sailing-ship, where you know all about the gear and make out yourselves. Here, you just have to stand by while we do it. And on top o' that, you come down here with your silly damn breakages and expect us to be tinkers as well. You think Mr. Tolleshunt is sadly deficient in respect, I dare say. But what of his side o' the question? He's been up all night and all morning on a breakdown. So's the second, who's still at it. So have I, for that matter. We've all three of us got just as good tickets as you. Ye never heard about it? Of course not. What could ye do for us? When ye've pulled that handle on the bridge and heard the gong answer, you're finished! Ye're in charge of a box of mechanism of which ye know nothing. Ye walk about in uniform and talk big about yer work, and what does it all amount to? Ye're a young man, and I'm, well, not so young, and I tell ye friendly, Mister, ye're a joke. Ye're what the newspapers call an anachronism or an anomaly, I forget which. Ye'll never get men like young Tolleshunt, men who know their work from A to Z, to treat ye seriously unless ye take hold and study a ship for what she is, a mass o' machinery. Ye'll have to get shut o' the notion that as soon as ye become officers, ye must lose the use o' your hands. Now there's just as much engineerin' about that binnacle as there is in a kettle or a rabbit hutch. Put one o' your young apprentices to it, and if he can't, make him learn. I've been with old-time skippers who could do anything, from wire-splicing to welding an anchor shackle. They learned in the yard before they went to sea. Your young fellers can do nothing except slather a hose round the decks and ask for higher wages. Now don't be sore because I'm telling ye the truth. We're busy and we're tired. We've all sorts o' trouble you can't understand, vital matters that mean speed and safety. Suppose, after a spell on the bridge in fog, ye were to come down to yer room and find me there with some ash-bags to sew up, eh? Imagine it! Just imagine it!"

He sat there, looking sideways at Mr. Spokesly, his pipe between his enormous thumb and knuckle, asking Mr. Spokesly to imagine this fearsome thing. But Mr. Spokesly's imagination was for the time being out of commission. He was scarcely conscious of the request, so intensely preoccupied was he with the ghastly cleavage between his own estimate of his position and the chief's. Back of all these frank insults to his dignity, Mr. Spokesly scented the sinister prejudice of his commander. As he strode, in severe mental disarray, back to his room, he discovered a conviction that the chief "had been pumpin' the Old Man." Not that he needed any pumping, of course. It would be only too like him to blab to an engineer about his own officers. Well, there it was! Mr. Spokesly pitched the hapless binnacle on the settee and turned to the wash-stand. Perhaps it was due to the course of the London School of Mnemonics, the course in tracing the association of ideas, that when his eye fell on the tumblers in the rack he should think of that abominable trick of the Old Man sneaking in and smelling the glass to see if he, Mr. Spokesly, had been drinking. Couldn't trust him that far! Do what he would he could give no satisfaction. He would ask to be paid off to-morrow as soon as they dropped anchor in Saloniki harbour. That would be the best way. Just pull out of it. They would realize, when he was gone, the sort of man they had lost. The flame of indignation died out again and he sat moodily pondering the difficulty of commanding an adequate appreciation. Command! The word stung him to bodily movement. If only he could once grasp the sceptre, he could defy them all. He would have the whip-hand then. And there were ways, there were ways of making money. Some he had heard of on this run were quadrupling their incomes. Archy had whispered incredible stories of skippers and stewards working together ... working together. Perhaps it would be worth while to stick to the ship for a voyage or so, even if he did have to put up with this sort of thing. They would reach Saloniki in a few hours, and then they would see.

It frequently happens that moods which would logically drive men mad, moods which seem to have no natural antidote, are broken up and neutralized by some entirely fortuitous event. It is not too much to say that Mr. Spokesly's grievances were inducing one of these moods, when the wholesome activity of affairs on the forecastle-head, the keen autumn wind blowing across the bony ridges of Chalcidice, and the professional criticism evoked by the ships outward-bound, blew the foul vapours away. Captain Meredith, whose reflective and unchallenging blue eyes were visible between the weather-cloth and the laced peak of his cap, made a mental note that "the man was doing himself justice." Of course Captain Meredith did not perceive how very wide of the mark his sensible phrase led him. Mr. Spokesly always did himself justice. What he was eternally hunting for, in and out of the maze in which he spent his life, was justice from others. Captain Meredith did not realize that a middle-aged man with a grievance is like a man who has been skinned—to touch him causes the most exquisite agony. Nay, merely to exist, to permit the orderly march of every-day routine, chafes him to the verge of hysteria. It was nothing to Mr. Spokesly that he was serving his country; nothing to him that he was in imminent peril by mine and torpedo. During the voyage he had scarcely noticed the occasional formal slips that came from the wireless house informing them that an enemy submarine was operating in such and such a position, so many miles ahead or astern as the case might be. Mr. Spokesly had never seen a submarine and he didn't want to. The whole business of war in his eyes became a ghastly farce so long as he was not appreciated at his true worth. It might almost be said that at times he was indifferent to the outcome of the gigantic struggle. A horrible unrest assailed him. The world was heaving in a death grapple with the powers of darkness and he was as nothing in the balance.

But as he walked the forecastle-head and the Tanganyika passed through the bottle neck of Kara Burun into the wide waters of the gulf-head, he was restored to a normal attention to the cut-and-dried duties of his calling. There was exhilaration in the thought of foregathering once more with Archy, of going ashore in a new port. And there would be letters. He drew a deep breath. Ada would write. Unconsciously he straightened up. A warm glow suffused him as he recalled her dark-gray, adoring eyes and the deep tremble of her voice as she called him her sailor sweetheart. After all, he was that. He was understood there, he thought, and was comforted. Rung by rung he climbed up out of the dark dank well in which he had been dwelling until, when the compressors had been screwed up tight and the Tanganyika was swinging gently on her eighty fathom of cable, he was recapitulating the heartening words he had last read in his "course" in the London School of Mnemonics.

Think well of yourself and your ability, it ran. Get the habit of believing in your own ambition. This is only another way of saying that faith can move mountains. But remember that to be satisfied with what you are is to lose grip. If you are standing still you are slipping back. This paradox will be shown....

It was some hours later, after dinner, that Captain Meredith sat at the desk in his room looking out of the big side-scuttle at the blood-red and purple of the western sky beyond the Vardar delta. It was such a sunset as one may see across Lake Pontchartrain in the fall, or looking up some aisle of the dark silent forests that fringe the swamps of the Georgia coast. It has the opaque glamour that comes from the dense vapours rising from a marsh, the tangible beauty of a giant curtain rather than the far glories of miles of ambient mountain air. But Captain Meredith was not occupied with esthetic musings. In his hand he held a letter from the superintendent in London, and he sought seclusion, as was his wont, in looking out towards the immense polychrome of the sky. For the letter contained orders which might involve him in some difficulties. He was instructed to file, in an enclosed form, precise particulars of all his officers' records, and return them accompanied by his own opinion as to their fitness for promotion. It would be necessary, he was informed, to engage a large number of additional officers for a fleet which the company had purchased all standing, and the directors were anxious that those already in their employ should have the pick of the billets. It was important, he was warned, that he use care in recommending any man, as the directors proposed to act upon these suggestions, and the failure of a nominee would react unfavourably upon the prestige of the commander responsible for the report.

Like all men who have grown up inside the protecting walls of tradition and routine, Captain Meredith was unable to view a situation without prejudice. Some small portion of free and independent judgment he had, or he would never have become master; but the bulk of the decisions which he had to make were obtained by unconscious reference to rules, written or unwritten. This order, however, involved just that small part of his mental equipment which made his work of interest to him, his imagination if you like. It forced him to take a far wider view than was ordinarily advisable. He was aware of the popular legends which have grown around great commanders—legends of their genius for selecting subordinates, their uncanny aptitude for appraising a man's powers at a glance. Not so easy, Captain Meredith had found it. Like most of us, he had in time cultivated a habit of suspending judgment, a habit of discounting the dreadful efficiency of the new broom, the total abstainer, the college-graduate, and the newly married. What he waited for time to reveal was the man's principle. Without the main girder and tie-ribs of principle, all was as nothing. And yet what comprised this principle Captain Meredith would have been sore put to it to explain. It was not enthusiasm, nor was it will power. It was not even intellect or civil responsibility. It was deeper than any of these, a subtle manifestation of character as elusive and imponderable as a beam of light or the expression on a man's face. Somewhat to his surprise Captain Meredith's reflections showed him that not even compatibility of temperament had much to do with it. He and old McGinnis had never been warm friends, had even had frequent differences on minor details of executive routine. Neither of them would have invited the other to his home, had the opportunity served. That did not matter. He had had some experience of officers quite different from Mr. McGinnis, clever, gay young men, "good mixers," passengers' favourites, and he had discovered that a man may be a brilliant social success and a useless incumbrance at the same time. To state the problem to himself was difficult, but it was forced upon him irresistibly when he endeavoured to formulate his mature conclusions upon the subject of Mr. Spokesly. His chief officer was his chief concern. Of the others he was able to set down a fairly just and intelligible estimate. Young Chippenham was a bundle of amiable possibilities. He would have to get his certificates before the company would make him or break him. The chief engineer was at the other end of the scale. His name was made. Behind him was a career of solid responsibility, of grave crises met and mastered with cool generalship and unbeatable energy. He was one of those men who carry in their own personality the prestige of a race, a nation, and a learned profession. Of the others it would be safe to take his verdict. Mr. Spokesly, therefore, remained the chief source of anxiety. For it was not a simple question of bearing witness to Mr. Spokesly's ability as a seaman, as a navigator, or as a desirable junior officer. The tremendous responsibility from which Captain Meredith shrank was twofold. On the one hand, he had to accept the onus of recommending his chief officer for a command. On the other lay the grave danger of injustice to a brother professional. Mr. Spokesly was a man no longer in his first youth, no doubt engaged to be married, with ambitions and aspirations with which Captain Meredith had the deepest sympathy. It was no small matter to stop a man's promotion. He remembered how he himself, piqued at some ungenerous act of the company, had talked of resignation, and his commander had taken him by the arm and muttered contemptuously, "And spoil yourself for life, eh?" And when asked "How?" that same shipmaster had drawn a brutal picture of a man throwing up a billet just as he was getting a name, entering another employ as a junior, spending years working up to chief mate again, only to find about a score of active, intelligent, and experienced officers on the list ahead of him, and gradually resigning himself to the colourless existence of an elderly failure. Captain Meredith was not the man to condemn a brother officer to such a fate without an overwhelming conviction. Rather would he....

But his thoughts refused to travel that road. He sat looking out at the sombre beauty of the sky, noting the long rigid black bar that divided sharply the dark swamps from the shining pallor of the roadstead. He tapped his teeth with his pencil. No, he was not prepared to jeopardize his own prospects. He had a family. He hoped to spend more time with them later ... after the war. He was beginning to think sea life was narrowing. One got out of touch with so many phases of human interest and activity.... One toiled and moiled, and suffered agonies of anxiety and defeated vigilance; sleep and leisure went by the board for days; one found fault and made mistakes; superior young men in warships asked sarcastic questions during the small hours; and all to what end? After all, one only earned for all this the salary which a successful barrister or surgeon would pay his chauffeur. It was preposterous, when one came to regard it. So Captain Meredith's thoughts ran on, with a sort of light bitterness, sharpening their flavour and inclining him to charity. In more senses than one, he and Mr. Spokesly were in the same boat. He put his papers away in a drawer, picked up his cigar to take the air on the bridge. Without registering any final and irrevocable decision, he had made a mental note that "unless the man made an ass of himself" he would not stand in his way.

The sun, concealed behind a distant range, threw up a ruddy and vigorous glow as from an open cupola, but the roadstead lay in a profound shadow whose edge began to sparkle with coloured lights of a singular distinctness and individuality. It was like watching from the depths of space a congregation of blessed yet still intensely personal spirits on the heavenly shores. They stood in clusters or apart, in long lines or zigzags far up the mountain side. At times they were obliterated by trolley cars—gently moving glares which bore on their foreheads flashing blue-white gems. At other times a fountain of sparks indicated an otherwise invisible puff of smoke from a locomotive, and whole galaxies of shining points would vanish while an ammunition train moved laboriously across the city. But no knowledge of the actual causes could destroy the illusion that the lights were informed with an intelligent vitality. They winked and quivered with mysterious emotions. They went on journeys among other fixed stars of greater magnitude. They came out in boats over the dark water as though possessed with a passion for exploring, and then, losing heart, would go back in a hurry, or else expire. They raced along country roads and vanished in folds of the hills. They danced and were smitten with idiotic immobility. They were born, and they died sudden and inexplicable deaths. They were shocked, or were filled with calm content. Low down on the edge of the shore, where an open-air cinema was working convulsively, the lights had collected in some excitement around the screen. Captain Meredith, raising his night glasses to inspect this novel portent, imagined himself watching a square hole in a dark spangled curtain, through which a drama of inconceivable brightness and rapidity could be observed. It was, the captain imagined whimsically, like watching a huge brain at work, if such a thing were possible. He occasionally took refuge from himself in such reflections. Without any pretence to originality, he occasionally found himself in possession of thoughts for which custom had provided no suitable phrase. With the humility common to those of gentle birth who have followed the sea, he kept the results to himself. Even in letters to his wife, he adhered to the conventional insipidity that makes an Englishman's letters home one of the wonders of the world. He had become somewhat fearful of originality, even in others, during his honeymoon, when he had tried timidly to interest his wife in a novel he was reading. It was a novel about sailors and the sea, of all things in the world, and Captain Meredith had been so intrigued with the notion of a story written about sailors without distorting them out of all recognition that he couldn't keep it to himself. And he had been completely nonplussed when his gentle, blonde, and slightly angular young wife had displayed not merely a tepid lack of interest but downright dislike. "I don't like it," she had said acidly, and returned to her own book, an interminable tale of gipsies and highwaymen in masks, and a "reigning toast" with forty thousand pounds. They had been married some time before he realized just what it was she didn't like in the story. And when he realized it, he put the thought from him in trepidation, for he was prepared to sacrifice everything for her sake. She embodied for him all that he craved of England. She was typical, as she bent over their one child, a flaxen-haired little girl with incredibly thin limbs. And he was typical, too—as he thought of them and their setting at Ealing—the modern Englishman who has given intellectual hostages to fortune.

CHAPTER IV

Mr. Spokesly once said in so many words that he disbelieved utterly in premonition. There was, he said, nothing in it. If there were, he remarked, we should be different. When pressed, he admitted freely that if we could read the signs we might get adequate warning of impending events; but by the time we have gotten the experience we are too old to bother about the future at all. This, of course, was when the war was finished and Mr. Spokesly, with the rest of the Merchant Service, had slipped back into that obscure neglect from which they had temporarily emerged. The gist of his remarks, therefore, seems to bear out the view that he had not the faintest notion, when he went ashore that evening in Saloniki with the gifted and amusing Mr. Bates, that he was on the brink of a fundamental change in his life. Looking back, he was almost induced to imagine that it was someone else who came ashore with Mr. Bates, a sort of distant relation, say, who had borrowed his body for the evening. And he was inclined to admit that, assuming what the philosophers say is true—that the only use of knowledge is for the purpose of action—it would preserve our idealism if our subconscious adumbrations could only be induced to function in a more emphatic manner.

The reason for interjecting this sample of Mr. Spokesly's later mentality is to be rid of any possible ambiguity. If Mr. Spokesly had been nothing more than Mr. Bates's boon companion his story would not be worth telling, there being obviously so many other more interesting people in the world. We have seen that Mr. Spokesly himself was aware of his real value, and had appealed to the London School of Mnemonics to elucidate his latent self from the commonplace shell in which he strove. The London School of Mnemonics responded nobly according to its doctrines. It supplied him with an astonishing quantity of intellectual fuel, so to say, but omitted to indicate how it was to be ignited. Indeed, it is very singular how public and commercial organizations continually lose sight of the fact that in the spiritual world spontaneous combustion does not exist. And it is also true that the stark and secular desires of a man's soul, however powerful they may be to achieve a multiplicity of base ends, can do nothing for the man himself unless they are illuminated and shot through by some grand passion, whether of friendship, religion, or love. Which of these, depends upon the man. Some fortunate beings are the exponents of all three. Most of us, and Mr. Spokesly was one, are destined to know very little of either friendship or religion. So much might have been postulated. He was under no illusions as to his emotional resources. His remark that he could fall in love with almost any girl, so long as she had a bit o' money, was really a very fine declaration of extreme modesty. The virtuous are less humble. They lay extravagant claims to the privilege of having an ideal. Mr. Spokesly, as he sat beside Mr. Bates, who was smiling to himself in the darkness, watched the flashing lights of the Place de la Liberté grow larger and larger; and, as the din of the traffic reached his ears, experienced that feeling of pleasant and passive receptivity which he learned in time to know as the inevitable precursor of some momentous change.

Not so Mr. Bates, who smiled in the darkness. Mr. Bates was one of those human beings who manifest the shadowless and unwinking intelligence of the lower animals. The past, to Mr. Bates, was a period in which he had done well. The future was a period in which he would do well. Between these two delectable countries Mr. Bates moved gently along, a slightly intoxicated optimist. The perils of the sea and of war, the hatred of man or the wrath of God made no conscious impression upon Mr. Bates at all. Any of them might crush him at any moment, but he proceeded steadily upon his predatory way very much as a spider crossing a path proceeds until some careless but omnipotent passer crushes it beneath his heel. His attitude towards the gigantic engines of human destiny, which preoccupy most of us so much, was expressed in the pussy-cat smile in the darkness—a smile unseen and undesired.

"We'll go into Floka's first," he remarked, as the boat bumped the marble steps between the kiosks of the Place. He stood up, and his smile was illuminated by the sizzling glare of the arc lights along the quay, a smile that was, as we have said, fitted on over his face, and which bobbed up and down in obedience to the rhythmic undulations of the boat in the water. They waited for a moment until the Greek had made fast, and then stepped ashore.

"Why, is that a good place?" enquired Mr. Spokesly.

"Oh, yes. The best place. My friend, he goes there often. By and by, of course, we'll go along and see the talent. I'll show you, my boy. Believe me...." They crossed the car lines and walked towards the café which Mr. Bates's friend honoured. Floka's was full. The little tables outside were thickly populated with gentlemen engaged in the national pastime of cigarette-smoking and coffee-drinking, and the grandiose interior, as severe and lofty and dirty as a Balkan politician, was thick with smoke and murmurous with conversation and the consumption of food. Mr. Bates led the way to a far corner where a long thin man, his frock coat falling away open from a heavily brocaded vest with onyx buttons, and his scarlet tarboosh on one side of his head, was lolling on the crimson plush cushions. In one hand he held the stem of an amber-mouthed narghileh. On the table was an empty coffee cup and a glass of mastic. Across his long thin thighs lay a Greek newspaper. He was reclining completely inert, gazing moodily across the crowded restaurant. The alteration in his demeanour when he became aware of Mr. Bates standing before him was dramatic. It was as though he had suddenly seen a very funny joke and had been subjected to an electric current of high voltage at the same time. He sprang to his feet with extraordinary animation, and his face was contorted from a sombre melancholy to what seemed to be an almost demoniac joy. It would be a solecism to say he looked as though a fortune had been left him. No one was at all likely to leave Mr. Dainopoulos a fortune. No one had ever left anything of value within his reach without regretting it extremely. It will suffice to say that his features registered a certain degree of pleasure upon seeing Mr. Bates.

"Why, my dear friend!" he exclaimed in a sort of muffled scream, and he wrung the honest hand of Mr. Bates as though that gentleman had only that moment rescued him from a combination of drowning and bankruptcy. "And how are you? Sit down if you please. What will you have to drink? You must be—what you call it?—dry. Ha-ha! Sit down. This is good luck. Your friend? I am very pleased. Sit down please. Here!" He clapped his hands with frightful vehemence, and held up a distracted waiter who was in full flight towards a distant table with a loaded tray. Mr. Dainopoulos, gently pressing Mr. Bates and Mr. Spokesly into two chairs, addressed the waiter as Herakles and gave him an order which sounded to his guests like a loose board being ripped forcibly from a nailed-up box. Mr. Spokesly, sitting immediately opposite this monster of hospitality, was not favourably impressed. Mr. Dainopoulos rarely impressed people favourably at first. The long emaciated face had the texture of the uppers of an old buckskin shoe. The bloodshot brown eyes in their reddened sockets seemed in danger of falling into the great pouches of loose skin below them. The mouth, full of sharp yellow teeth and open as though about to yawn, had been slit back to the salience of the jaw at some time and had been sewn up in a sketchy fashion indicated by a white zig-zag scar like a flash of lightning. As he talked this scar worked with disconcerting vivacity. Mr. Spokesly turned with relief to the whiskies and sodas which appeared, borne by the industrious Herakles.

"And how is business?" asked Mr. Bates, having lifted his glass and set it down empty. Beyond three or four sherries and bitters and a glass of gin and vermouth, before coming ashore, he had drunk nothing all day. He was thirsty. "And how is business?"

A simple question. And yet Mr. Dainopoulos did not render a simple answer. He regarded Mr. Bates for a moment and then turned his head cautiously to right and left. Preserving an impressive silence he caught Mr. Spokesly's eyes and smiled, taking a suck at his narghileh. It was at this juncture that two French naval officers, seated at a distant table and smoking cigarettes in long ivory holders (to keep the smoke from their beards), exchanged opinions upon the folly of their British allies in permitting the officers of ships to come ashore in civilian attire.

"You are quite sure, of course, that they are officers of a transport?" said the elder, observing with attention.

"Quite, my commandant. From the Tanganyika, arrived to-day. The little one I know well. The other I observed upon the forecastle as she anchored."

"But what are they doing in company with him?"

The lieutenant raised his shoulders.

"I imagine, my commandant, that they do a little business in hashish. But in any case it is not what you imagine. The English do not spy."

"But Dainopoulos may use them, eh?"

"Impossible, my commandant. You do not know them. I do. As you are aware, I was in the Crédit Lyonnais in Lombard Street. If Mr. Dainopoulos attempted to enlist their services they would batter his head in with his own narghileh. They have no compunction about robbing their government by peculation, but treachery is not their métier. And our friend knows it quite well."

"Business," observed Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly, "is very bad."

Mr. Bates seemed very amused at this and leaned over the dirty marble-topped table.

"Count us both in, my friend here and me, for the same as last time. How about it, eh?"

"Oh!" Mr. Dainopoulos pulled his extended frame up and put his elbows on the table, his eyes blinking quickly. "Oh, that's all right. Yes, certainly. But I mean to say business is very bad. You would not believe me, Mister, but the chances that are going, and all for a little management, are lost! Incredible! Only this week"—here he lowered his voice so that Mr. Spokesly, who was listening with undivided attention, scarcely gathered the words—"only this week, I could have made—ah, much money—if I had with me an Englishman who knows the business. Ten thousand drachma, easy as that!" Mr. Dainopoulos snapped his fingers without a sound and looked depressed.

Mr. Bates did not look depressed. His smile evaporated and he looked down his nose into his moustache with an expression of ruffled propriety.

"I must say——" he began, and added, after a pause, "'Course we hadn't arrived, but I should 'ave thought, seein' we was due here, you might have counted on me."

Mr. Dainopoulos regarded Mr. Bates as though he were sizing him up for the first time and found him to amount to an almost negligible quantity. And then he shook his head.

"No," he murmured in a muffled tone. "That's not what I meant. What I wanted—too late now, of course—was a Kapitan."

Mr. Bates, touching Mr. Spokesly's foot with his own, emitted a snigger right in the face of Mr. Dainopoulos.

"And what about it?" he queried, impudently. "My friend here's got a master's ticket. What's the matter with him? I'm surprised——"

He was. To Mr. Bates it was unpleasant to discover that Mr. Dainopoulos should doubt his ability to cope with any situation which involved a financial reward. That gentleman, however, was not exclusively preoccupied with Mr. Bates and his emotions. He turned immediately to Mr. Spokesly who sat quietly twisting his glass of whiskey on the marble table. The pale, prominent, and bloodshot brown eyes examined Mr. Spokesly with passionless attention. Mr. Dainopoulos had filled many posts in his career. Quite apart from his participation in what he discreetly alluded to as "the wars," he had rendered some slight assistance to the builders of the Panama Canal as stoker on an excavator, he had worked in a felt-hat factory in Newark, New Jersey; he had been a waiter in a Greek café near Franklin Square, New York; he had held the position of clerk in the warehouse of a Turkish tobacco importer in London; and he had also been an assistant purser in one of the Roumanian Lloyd mail steamers which used to run from Costanza to Alexandria. He was one of those people who, as the saying is, "could write a book," which means they can do or have done almost everything except write a book. Such people are rarely of a literary turn. Mr. Dainopoulos certainly was not. But he had one faculty which, if literary people only knew it, is of use even in literature. He could size a man up. By a natural turn of judgment, so necessary to success in his business as a "general merchant and exporter" coupled with ceaseless practice, he had acquired a skill in sizing up which seemed as effortless and intuitive as the driving of a fine golfer or the wrist-work of a professional billiard player. The London School of Mnemonics could teach Mr. Dainopoulos nothing about practical psychology. He might even have given them some useful hints. In the present instance he was not at a loss. He waited, however, for Mr. Spokesly to make some comment.

"That's right enough," said the latter, leaning forward and smiling. "But I'd have to know a little more of the game, you understand? There's a war on, you know. Can't be too careful."

"True," assented Mr. Dainopoulos reflectively and keeping his prominent eyes fixed upon Mr. Spokesly. "You do not wish, then, to take a chance?"

"Oh, a chance!" Mr. Spokesly achieved a certain irony as he emphasized the last word. "Your ideas of a chance and mine might be different. S'pose we have another drink."

The watchful Herakles came near as Mr. Spokesly lifted his hand, and took the order.

The fact was—and it may be presumed that Mr. Dainopoulos perceived it sufficiently well to make allowance for it—that Mr. Spokesly, as he sat beside Archy Bates and listened to the conversation, had experienced a sudden access of caution. Archy was not drunk, and as far as was humanly known, never would be really drunk; but he was sufficiently saturated to raise a certain distrust in the mind of a perfectly sober man. It may even be said that while Mr. Spokesly had no clear intention of deserting his chum Archy, he was beginning to wish that Archy were not indispensable in any scheme that might be proposed. And the occasional looks that various British and French officers cast in their direction made Mr. Spokesly uneasy. He suddenly realized the other aspect of making money in a shady fashion: that one has to do business with shady people. Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, looked extremely shady. Archy Bates, his long, sharp nose buried in a fresh whiskey and soda, his hat pushed back revealing the oiled graying hair parted in the middle and slicked back above his ears with their purple veins; Archy, picking dreamily among the pieces of fish and beetroot which had been served on little dishes with the drinks, looked extraordinarily like a rat picking at garbage. All very well, Mr. Spokesly reflected, to buy hashish and sell it in Egypt at four or five hundred per cent. profit, so long as the business could be transacted in a gentlemanly manner. But this new development—he did not see his way clear to accepting Mr. Dainopoulos as an employer. He was not fastidious—he had worked for a Chinese ship owner—but the officers at the other tables, in their inconceivably correct uniforms and polished harness, made him uneasy. Mr. Spokesly knew perfectly well that these people did not consider him as one of themselves. Even amid the noise and chaffering of a Saloniki café, rubbing shoulders with the uniforms of French, Greek, Serbian, Russian, and Italian officers, these men of his own race, he knew, never forgot the abyss that separates the seafaring man from themselves, the social crevasse which even Armageddon was powerless to abolish. Nevertheless, he felt he could never abandon for ever the possibility of entering, some day, the magic circle. It is this peculiarity of the English temperament which so often paralyses its victim at the very moment when he needs to be in possession of all his faculties, when the chance, perhaps of a lifetime, suddenly appears at his elbow.

But Mr. Dainopoulos, as has been said, could size a man up. He was intuitively aware that he had made no great impression upon Mr. Spokesly. And he had a special desire, now that chance had thrown them together, to engage the interest of a skilled navigator. He had received an offer which might result in a very large profit indeed. The business to which he had been referring, a mere matter of running a small cargo of canned goods down to a certain island and transferring it to an Austrian submarine, was a trifle. One could do that every day, right under the noses and beards of a dozen French naval officers. This was a much bigger affair. It involved the sale, at huge profit, of one of his little steamers which he had purchased for a song from the French early in the war, but it also involved the safe conduct of the vessel into an enemy port. His friends in Anatolia might compensate him ultimately for the destruction of his ship by an Allied warship and the crew could look out for themselves; but if the captain lost her by grounding, it would be a disaster of the first magnitude. All this passed through the nimble mind of Mr. Dainopoulos while Mr. Spokesly waited for further light on the nature of the service required. He saw the difficulty and, knowing the English character, he took his measure accordingly. He smiled.

"You come to my house and have some supper?" he remarked. "My wife would be pleased, I'm sure."

Mr. Spokesly looked at Archy Bates. That gentleman was no longer paying attention. In his own peculiar fashion he had arrived at some sort of intuitive recognition of the fact that Mr. Dainopoulos had no intention of letting him in on this affair. Well, that was all right, Mr. Bates reflected in one of those appallingly clear and coherent moments which suddenly open in the mentality of dipsomaniacs. That was all right. They were making a lot of money. Big risk for him, by Jove! but he was willing to shoulder it. By Jove! That last time in Port Said, when the police rushed into his cabin not five minutes after the laundryman, who also took his rake-off, had carried the stuff ashore in a boat-load of dirty sheets. It was a near thing. Two hundred quid he had netted over that, paid in Turkish gold. And they had found the bit of burlap in which it had been wrapped. He saw the chief of police now, standing there, in his bright red fez, and white uniform, legs apart, holding the thing to his nose. Hashish, by Jove! A close call! "What's this?" Mr. Bates jumped and made the table shake. Mr. Spokesly was speaking. For a moment he had forgotten where he was. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He smiled with relief.

"Shall we go?" repeated Mr. Spokesly. Somewhat to his surprise, Mr. Bates shook his head. He was still smiling with relief, for that brief moment, during which his consciousness had slipped back a couple of months, as it were, and reënacted the scene in his cabin, had been very real. Five years in an Egyptian penitentiary missed by five minutes and a quick-witted explanation! While he shook his head and smiled into Mr. Spokesly's face he was thinking that he would take twice as much this time, and he knew where to hide it. Moreover, and he smiled more like a cat than ever, the millions of lines round his eyes deepening, he reflected that if Mr. Spokesly went in on this there was practically no risk at all. Nothing easier than to say——Eh, what? No! He was going along to the Amphitryon, to see a little friend of his. See them later. Aw—ri!

It was a notable feature of Mr. Bates's temperamental failing that it never affected his legs. In earlier years, as a saloon waiter, he had often astounded his shipmates by getting as drunk as a lord before dinner, and yet going down the long dining saloon of a great liner, a plate of soup in each hand, and depositing them in front of passengers in evening dress, without ever an accident. Perhaps his demeanour was a shade more deliberate, his attention a trifle more abstracted, on these occasions; that was all. And now, as he rose and went towards the door of Floka's, after a dignified farewell to Mr. Dainopoulos, although an occasional wandering eye fastened upon him for a moment, Mr. Bates never betrayed himself. He paused courteously at the door while a major with his brigadier in tow passed in, monocles reflecting the light in a blind white glare so that they resembled Cyclops, and then he walked out gently himself, and was immediately lost in the noise and bustle of the Place.

Mr. Dainopoulos looked at Mr. Spokesly and thrust a thumb into the armhole of his coat.

"Your friend," he began in a low mutter, "him and me we do big business—you understand?—but all the same he drink too much highball. No good, eh?"

"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "he's his own master, and he can please himself about that. To tell the truth, though, if there's anything in—what you were speaking of, I'd just as soon he wasn't in it. You see what I mean?" Mr. Dainopoulos nodded and drew at his narghileh. "He's a friend of mine, and very good friend, too, but we got to draw a line somewhere." Again Mr. Dainopoulos nodded as he leaned across the table.

"And another thing!" he remarked in his muffled tones, and he held the mouthpiece of the narghileh just in front of his lips as though it were a speaking tube and he was engaged in conversation with someone at the other end. He even cast his eyes down, and seemed to abandon Mr. Spokesly entirely. "And another thing. Mr. Bates, he very fond—you know—very fond of the mademoiselles. That's all right. If you like them, very good. But Mr. Bates, he comes all the time to me. Want me—you understand? Now, I do no business in that line, none at all. I don't like it. Plenty men tell you, 'Oh, yes, you come with me.' You understand? But me, I got my family to think about. Now you understand?"

"It is not respectable," added Mr. Dainopoulos in a deep tone, and relapsed into silence and the narghileh.

Mr. Spokesly did not reply. Even when they had left the café and were being driven along the quai in the direction of the White Tower, on their left the dazzle and noise of cafés-chantant and cinemas, on their right the intense darkness of the Gulf, he did no more than acquiesce in what Mr. Dainopoulos was saying. For to tell the truth, Mr. Spokesly was making certain readjustments within himself. Neither Mr. Bates nor Mr. Dainopoulos was of vital importance to the growth of his soul, yet they come in here. They were backgrounds on which were silhouetted combinations novel to him. He had to find room in his mind for the conception of a shady person who cultivated the domestic virtues. Mr. Spokesly might be a man of inferior calibre, easily swayed by the prospect of easy money, but his mind swung naturally to the equilibriums of respectability. "All that," as he called it, "was a thing o' the past." He was tired of the shabby and meretricious byways he had frequented, in moderation, for so long. With more knowledge of introspection he would have known this as one of the signs of coming change. Coming events are very often a glorified reincarnation of dead desires. Dreams come true. Fortunate men recognize them in time.

"Your family?" said Mr. Spokesly, and the man beside him turned towards him and said:

"When I say 'family' I mean 'my wife.'"

Mr. Spokesly had no definite image in his mind of the domestic arrangements of a man like Mr. Dainopoulos. The scarlet tarboosh on that gentleman's head leaned the Englishman's fancy to a harem. In any case, the Island Race imagine that every Levantine who wears a fez is a Turk, that every Turk is a polygamist, and finally that polygamy implies a score or two of wives locked up in cupboards. But the tone in which Mr. Dainopoulos uttered the word "wife" precluded anything of this sort. It was a tone which Mr. Spokesly immediately comprehended. It was the tone in which Englishmen refer to their most valued possession and their embodied ideals. There is no mistaking it. There is nothing like it in the world. It is a tone implying an authorized and expurgated edition of the speaker's emotional odyssey.

"And so," he went on, "you can see how I don't want to get mixed up in any of these here places." And he opened his hand towards the subdued glare of the cafés and dance halls. Mr. Spokesly saw. He saw also, in imagination, Archy Bates sitting, hand to moustache, amid the chalk-faced hetairai of Saloniki, second-rate harpies who had had their day on the Parisian trottoirs, and who had been shipped by a benevolent government to assuage the ennui of the Armée d'Orient. He saw them from time to time with his physical eyes, too, as they came to the doors of their refuges and, setting off to visit confederates, flung a glance of shrewd appraisal towards the passing vehicle.

"Yes," he muttered. "I see, Mr.—Mr.——"

"Dainopoulos," said that gentleman.

"Mr. Dainopoulos, I'm no saint, y'understand, but all the same—well, a man wants something, y'understand? Besides," added Mr. Spokesly, "'twixt you an' me an' the stern-post, I'm engaged."

"You don't tell me!" exclaimed Mr. Dainopoulos in that peculiarly gratifying fashion which seemed to imply that this was the first betrothal announced since the Fall of Constantinople. "You don't tell—and I bet you what you like she's English, eh?"

"Yes, she's English all right," said Mr. Spokesly, feeling somewhat embarrassed by his friend's triumphant cordiality. "Pretty safe bet, that," he added as the carriage stopped in front of a black, solid wooden gate in a high yellow wall.

"Safe enough?" laughed Mr. Dainopoulos, not quite seizing the point intended. "Why, sure! Englishwomen are the best of all. I ought to know. Ha-ha!" and he slapped Mr. Spokesly's knee while his other hand sought the price of the ride. Mr. Spokesly failed to appreciate this approval of Englishwomen. A suspicion shot through his mind. He looked at the dark gate in the yellow wall. What, precisely, did this man mean by that last remark? Was all this talk of family and so forth a blind? Was he, Mr. Spokesly, on the brink of an adventure? It must be confessed that he would not have objected to that; but his gorge rose in spite of him at the reference to Englishwomen.

"I don't quite understand," he remarked in a low tone. "How do you happen to know so much about 'em?"

Mr. Dainopoulos laughed again and handed the fare to the driver. He stepped out, held a bunch of keys to the light of the carriage lamp, and selected one. Then he beckoned to Mr. Spokesly to alight.

"I'll tell you, Mister," he said, as he stooped, inserted the key, turned it, and pushed open the gate. "Because I married one myself."

CHAPTER V

Mr. Spokesly, in a state of considerable astonishment, sat by a balconied upper window and tried to get his recent experiences into some sort of focus. That last remark of Mr. Dainopoulos, that he had married one himself, had dislocated his guest's faculties, so that Mr. Spokesly was unable to note clearly by what means he had arrived at his present position, a balconied window on his right and in front of him a woman lying on a sofa. A woman whose brown hair, extraordinarily long and fine, was a glossy pile pressed into the pillow, and whose thin hand he had just relinquished.

"Well," he said, as Mr. Dainopoulos came forward with a lamp, his swart and damaged features giving him the air of a ferocious genie about to perform some nefarious experiment. "Well, I must say, I'm surprised."

Mrs. Dainopoulos continued to gaze straight out into the darkness over the Gulf.

"Of course," agreed her husband, seating himself and reaching for a large briar pipe. "Of course. And I'll bet you'd be still more surprised if you only knew—eh, Alice?" He screwed up one eye and looked prodigiously sly at his wife with the other, his palms slowly rubbing up some tobacco. Mrs. Dainopoulos did not remove her eyes from the darkness beyond the shore. She only murmured in a curt voice:

"Never mind that now, Boris."

"But it ain't anything to be ashamed of, you know," he returned earnestly, packing his pipe in a way that made Mr. Spokesly want to snatch it from him and do it properly.

"I know, but it wouldn't interest Mr. Spokesly, I'm quite certain," she muttered, and she suddenly looked at their visitor and smiled. It reassured that gentleman, as it was intended to do, that he was in no way responsible for this minute difference of viewpoint between husband and wife. Mr. Spokesly smiled, too.

"Don't mind me," he remarked, lighting a cigarette and offering the match to Mr. Dainopoulos. After sucking valiantly for a while and achieving a small red glow in one corner of the bowl, the latter rose and regarded his wife and his guest attentively for a moment.

"I'll tell you what I'll do," he said at length, and looked at his pipe, which was already out. "I'll go in and see Malleotis for a while. He'll be back by now. And you two can have a little talk before we have supper."

"Well, don't be all night. You know, when you and Mr. Malleotis get talking business——"

The woman on the couch paused, regarding her husband as he bent his head over her. Mr. Dainopoulos suddenly put his pipe in his pocket and put his hands on either side of the pillow. Mr. Spokesly could see nothing save the man's broad, humped shoulders. There was a moment of silence. Mr. Spokesly, very much embarrassed, looked out of the window. When he turned his head again Mr. Dainopoulos was putting on a large tweed cap and walking out of the door.

"I suppose," Mr. Spokesly remarked, and fixed his eyes upon the extremely decorative Scotch travelling rug which covered the woman's limbs, "I suppose he doesn't go off every evening and leave you here." He spoke jocosely. Mrs. Dainopoulos looked out into the darkness. There was a faint colour in her cheeks, as though the sudden revelation of the passion she could evoke had filled her with exquisite shame. Or perhaps pride. Her clear, delicate English face, the mouth barely closed, the short straight nose slightly raised, the brown hair spread in a slight disorder upon the pillow, were surely indicating pride. Some inkling of this possibility came to Mr. Spokesly, and he sat regarding her, while he waited for her to speak, and wondering how a woman like her had come to marry one of these here dagoes. Peculiar creatures, women, Mr. Spokesly thought; knowing nothing whatever about them, it may be mentioned. And when Mrs. Dainopoulos turned to look at him, soon after she began to speak, the prevailing fancy at the back of his mind was "She thinks I don't know anything about the ladies! Fancy that!"

"His business takes him out a good deal," she said in a low voice, "but he wouldn't go if he could help it. To-night is unusual."

"The pleasure is mine," said Mr. Spokesly.

"Not altogether," she smiled, and her speech became perceptibly more racy and rapid. "Don't flatter yourself. Mr. Dainopoulos was thinking of me."

"I dare say he does a good deal of that."

The woman on the sofa laced her fingers lightly and regarded her guest afresh.

"You are saucy," she murmured with a faint smile. Mr. Spokesly smiled more broadly. He was saucy, but he was certainly at home now with his companion. There was in her last speech, in the accent and inflection, something incommunicably indigenous, something no alien ever has or ever will compass.

"No need to ask what part of England you come from," he ventured.

"No?" she queried. "There seems nothing you don't know."

"Oh, excuse me, Mrs. Dainopoulos, that ain't fair. I can't sit here and twiddle my thumbs all the evening, can I? That wouldn't be giving you any pleasure as far as I'm aware. The boss didn't reckon I was going to play a mandolin or sing, did he?"

"Well, since you're so clever, what's the answer?"

"Not so very many miles from Charing Cross," he hazarded.

"Wonderful!" she said, laying her head back and smiling. Mr. Spokesly admired the pretty throat. "You ought to be in the secret service. Perhaps you are," she added.

"Of course," he agreed. "They've sent me out to see where all the nice London girls have got to. But am I right?"

She nodded.

"Haverstock Hill," she said quietly.

"No! Do you know Mafeking Road? When I was a kid we lived at sixty-eight."

"Yes, I know it. Don't you live round there now?"

"No, not now. We live down Twickenham way now."

And Mr. Spokesly began to tell his own recent history, touching lightly upon the pathos of Eastern exile, the journey home to join up, and his conviction that after all he would be a fool to go soldiering while the ships had to be kept running. And he added as a kind of immaterial postscript:

"And then, o' course, while I was at home I got engaged."

Mrs. Dainopoulos stared at him and broke into a brief titter behind a handkerchief.

"That's a nice way to give out the information," she remarked. "Anybody'd think getting engaged was like buying a railway ticket or sending a postal order. Is she nice?"

"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "I think so."

"Very enthusiastic!" commented the lady with considerable spirit. "Dark or fair?"

"Well," he repeated, "I should say dark myself."

"You don't intend to take any chances," Mrs. Dainopoulos retorted. "Haven't you a photo to show me?"

Mr. Spokesly felt his pockets, took out a wallet containing a number of unconvincing documents, some postage stamps and a five-piaster note.

"Matter of fact," he said, "I don't seem to have one with me. I got one on the ship, though," he went on. "Bring it ashore to-morrow."

"Sure you didn't tear it up by mistake or send it away in the laundry?" she demanded, watching him intently.

"Oh, all right, go on with the sarcasm," he protested, but enjoying it very much none the less. "Mr. Dainopoulos, you'll be telling me, has got your hair in a locket, I suppose."

Mr. Spokesly stopped abruptly. He saw an expression of extraordinary radiance on the girl's face as she lay there, her thin pale fingers holding the handkerchief by the corner. It suddenly occurred to Mr. Spokesly that this woman was loved. For the first time in his life he became aware of a woman's private emotional existence. He achieved a dim comprehension of the novel fact that a woman might have her own views of these great matters. He did not phrase it quite like this. He only sat looking at the girl on the sofa and remarking to himself that women were peculiar.

"Wouldn't you do that?" she demanded. The light in her eyes diminished to a steady warm regard.

And Mr. Spokesly began to assert himself once more. Women being so peculiar, there was no sense in being bullied into any of this here sentiment. He was a man of the world about to make a—what was it called? Marriage of convenience ... something like that. Not that exactly, either. Ada was a darned fine girl. This invalid lady seemed to think he didn't know what love was.

"Who? Me?" he ejaculated. "Can't say as I see myself, I admit. Not in my line. Not in any Englishman's line, I don't think. And speaking for myself, Mrs. Dainopoulos, I reckon I'm past that sort of thing, you know. Can't teach an old dog new tricks, can you? I look at it this way: so long as there's enough to keep the pot boiling, it's easy enough to fall in love with anybody, you see, and when you're married ... soon get used to it. Ada and me, we're sensible."

"You've got it all arranged, then," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, smiling faintly and looking out into the darkness once more.

"What's the use o' bein' anything else?" inquired Mr. Spokesly, resuming something of the perfect officer pose, hard-bitten, practical, and matter-of-fact. "All that business o' dyin' o' love, you know, I reckon's so much moon-shine. All right in a novel, o' course, but not in real life. You don't reckon there's anything in it, really, I mean?" he asked doubtfully.

"I think everything's in it," she sighed. "I think it must be horrible, being married, without it. Haven't you felt you couldn't do without her? That you'd die if you didn't get her; work, and do somebody else in the eye for her? Haven't you?"

"That lets me out," he said soberly, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I'm not guilty."

There was a brief silence. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled. He could not fit this experience in with one of the two cardinal points in an Englishman's creed, the belief that no English girl can really love a foreigner. The other, of course, is that no foreign girl is really virtuous.

"That's a nice thing to say!" she retorted, trembling a little with her emotions. "If that's the new way they have at home——"

"Oh, I don't know," he began and he looked at her. "I'm afraid you're getting all upset. I'm sorry, really, I didn't think you'd have been so serious about it. As if it mattered to you!"

"I'm thinking of her," she said with a little hysterical sob. "You mustn't——"

Mr. Spokesly was in a quandary again. If he put Ada's adoration in its true perspective, he would not think very highly of himself. He took no real pleasure in speaking of himself as a promised man even to a married woman. Yet how was he to get this particular married woman in delicate health and extremely robust emotions to see him as a human being and not a monster of cold-blooded caution? And there was another problem. What of this new and astonishing revelation—new and astonishing to him, at any rate—that love, to a woman, is not a mere decoction of bliss administered by a powerful and benevolent male, but a highly complicated universe of subjective illusions in which the lover is only dimly seen as a necessary but disturbing phantom of gross and agonizing ineptitudes? The wonder, however, is not that Mr. Spokesly was slow to discover this, but that he did not live and die, as many men do, without even suspecting it. He nodded his head slightly as he replied:

"You're right in a way," he muttered. "She thinks I'm—well, she thinks I'm brave to go to sea in war-time!" The extreme incongruity of such an hallucination made him giggle.

"She would! You are!" said the woman on the couch, almost irritably. "What do you want to laugh for? Don't you see what you miss?" she added in illogical annoyance.

"That the way you feel about Mr. Dainopoulos?" Mr. Spokesly asked. The woman turned her face so that the lamplight illumined her coiled hair and for a moment she did not reply. Then she said, her face still in the shadow:

"You'd only laugh if I told you."

"No," declared Mr. Spokesly. "Honest I won't. Laugh at meself—yes. But you—that's different."

"But you don't believe in love at first sight, I can see very well."

"I only said I hadn't anything like that happen to me," he replied slowly, pondering. "But I s'pose it has to be something like that in a case like yours."

"I don't understand you."

"Well, you being English, you see, and Mr. Dainopoulos a foreigner."

"As an excuse, I suppose? Father made the same remark, but I never thanked him."

Mr. Spokesly looked at her soberly. Her eyes were bright and resolute, and the lamplight threw into salience the curve of her jaw and chin. A fugitive thought flitted about his mind for a moment and vanished again—whether her father was inconsolable at his daughter's departure.

"You got married at home then?"

"Yes, after Mr. Dainopoulos saved my life."

"Did he?"

"Of course. That's how we met. Didn't you ever hear of the Queen Mab accident? It was in the papers."

"Can't say as I did. I was out East so long, you see. Wait a bit, though——" Mr. Spokesly pondered. "I fancy I remember reading something about it in the home papers; an excursion steamer in collision with a cargo boat, wasn't it?" The girl nodded.

"Down the river. I was in it. My sister—she was drowned. We were going to Southend."

"I see. And Mr. Dainopoulos, he was with you and——"

"No. I'd never seen him then. You see, we were all standing by the paddle-box when the other ship cut into us, my sister Gladys and two boys we'd been keeping company with. It was something awful, everybody screaming and the boat going up in the air. I mean the other end was going down. At last we couldn't stand, so we sat on the paddle-box. Then all of a sudden the boat slid over to one side and we went in."

Mr. Spokesly made a sound expressive of intense sympathy and interest.

"And next thing I knew was somebody was holding me up and he said, 'Don't move! Don't move!' But I couldn't! Something must have hit me when I fell in. I didn't know where then—the water was awfully cold. And then a boat came, and they lifted me in. And then he swam off again to find the others. I don't faint as a rule, but I did then. There were so many, and the screams—oh, it was shocking!

"But the worst was when we got on land again. It was near Woolwich and they turned a chapel or something into a hospital for us. And all the relations of the people on the Queen Mab came down, and Mr. Dainopoulos, who'd taken his landlady's daughter for the excursion, was sitting there in a blanket when the landlady and her husband came in. They hadn't found her. You know bodies don't come up sometimes, especially when a ship turns over. And they caught hold of him, calling out 'Where is our girl? What have you done with our girl?' They screamed at him!"

"Was he engaged to her?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

"Just the same as I was with Georgie Litwell who was drowned. Keeping company."

"And what happened then?"

"Why, we fell in love. That's what I was going to tell you so long as you promised not to laugh. He was in a wholesale tobacco merchant's in Mark Lane then and he took lodgings near us at Haverstock Hill. Those other people behaved as though he'd held their daughter's head under. Really they did. How could he help it? He saved six besides me. It wasn't his fault the boat sank."

"No, of course not. I see now."

"And then, you know, Mother made a fuss because he was foreign. Mother's a Berkshire woman, and she said she'd never thought she'd live to see a child of hers marry a man from goodness knows where. She didn't half go on, I can tell you. And Father had his own way of making me perfectly happy. He'd ask me, how many in the harem already? And I couldn't do a thing, lying on my back helpless. And at last, with the doctor saying I needed a sea-voyage to get my strength back, I thinks to myself, I'll take one; and with the accident insurance I had had the sense to carry ever since I'd started going to business, and what Boris had in the bank, we went. Or came, rather. We've been here ever since and nobody's heard either of us regret it, either."

And as she lay there looking out into the darkness of the Gulf with shining resolute eyes, it was plain that this romantic destiny of hers was a treasured possession. It dominated her life. She had found in it the indispensable inspiration for happiness, an ethical yet potent anodyne for the forfeiture of many homely joys. It was for her the equivalent of a social triumph or acceptance among peeresses of the realm. It is to be suspected that she had ever in her mind a vision of the wonder and awe she had evoked in the souls of the suburban girls among whom she had spent her life, and that this vision supported her and formed the base of a magnificent edifice. And it was an integral part of this edifice that love should be a romantical affair, a flame, noted by all and fed by the adoration of a husband who was harsh to the world, but to her a monster of infatuated fidelity.

Something of this impinged upon Mr. Spokesly's consciousness and he regarded her for a moment with profound respect.

"I should say," he muttered, returning to his cigarette, "you haven't done so badly for yourself."

She gave him an extraordinarily quick look, like a flash of sheet lightning from a calm evening sky, which left him puzzled. He was not aware, at that time, that no woman will ever admit she has bettered herself by marrying a given man. She must retain for ever that shining figure of him she might have loved, a sort of domestic knight-errant in golden armour, who keeps occasional vigils at her side while the weary actuality slumbers in gross oblivion. Mrs. Dainopoulos knew that Mr. Spokesly saw nothing of this. She knew him for what he was, a being entirely incapable of compassing the secrets of a woman's heart. She knew he imagined that love was all, that women were at the mercy of their love for men, and that chivalrous ideas, rusted and clumsily manipulated, were still to be found in his mind. And she saw the fragility and delicate thinness of his love affair with Ada Rivers. Anything could break it, anything could destroy it, she reflected. Those fancies ... of course he said he was engaged; but an engagement, as Mrs. Dainopoulos knew, having lived in a London suburb, was nothing. Yes, anything might make him forget Ada. And as she repeated the word "anything" to herself in a kind of ecstasy, Mrs. Dainopoulos turned her head quickly and listened. There was a sound of someone being admitted.

"So you've met your fate, anyway," she observed to Mr. Spokesly, yet still listening to the distant sound.

"Yes," he said with a smile, "I reckon you can cross me off as caught. What's that? Come back, I s'pose. Time for me to be off, anyway. I'm sure...."

Mrs. Dainopoulos held up her hand. She was still listening with her head slightly inclined, her eyes fixed upon Mr. Spokesly, as though absently pondering the perilous chances of his emotional existence. Cross him off as caught! She smiled again in that lambent heat-lightning way of hers. A woman who spends her life in a reclining seclusion becomes very much of a clairvoyant, an electric condenser of emotions. Mr. Spokesly was agreeably flattered by the intent interest of his companion's gaze. Quite a nice little tête-à-tête he'd had. It gave him a thrill to sit in intimate exchange of love experiences with an attractive married woman, even if she was an invalid. He felt a bit of a dog. He would write to Ada and tell her. Or would he? Did he want Ada to know anything about this visit to a mysterious house in Macedonia, a house so clandestine and bizarre he could scarcely convince himself that it was the abode of virtue? Did he? Ada was a long way off, in beleaguered England. He suddenly wondered what Ada had to do with this at all. With an ease that rather disturbed him he told himself that you could never tell what might happen nowadays. No use worrying about the future. Why, he might never get home. He dropped the ash from his cigarette into the tray on the table. Someone was coming with a quick decisive step up the stairs. He smiled at Mrs. Dainopoulos, not quite sure why she was holding up her hand. She was thinking "cross him off as caught," and smiling, when the someone arrived at the door and knocked.

"Why didn't you get married before you left England?" she asked quickly, and added in louder tone, "Come in!"

In sharp contrast to the rapid movements without, the door opened with extreme cautiousness, and at first nothing could be seen save the hand on the knob. Mr. Spokesly had been thrown into some disorder of mind by that last question. Why hadn't he, anyway? It was something he had never decided. Why had they not done what thousands had done in England, which was simply to marry on the spot and sail a week, or perhaps a few days, later? Why had he not taken the hazards of war? He had more, far more, than many of those girls and boys at home. It was at this point, facing for the first time the unconscious evasions of life, that he found himself facing something else, a girl with a startled and indignant light in her eyes. He uncrossed his legs and began to rise as Mrs. Dainopoulos said, "Come in, Evanthia. It is all right."

She came in, letting the door swing to as she moved with a long rapacious stride towards the sofa. It was obvious she was preoccupied with some affair of intense importance to herself. Once Mr. Spokesly's presence had been indicated she became again absorbed in her errand. Her amber-coloured eyes, under exquisitely distinct brows, were opaque with anger, and she held one hand out with the fingers dramatically clenched, as though about to release a thunderbolt of wrath. The gesture was as antique as it was involuntary. One heard drums muttering and the gathering of fierce Ægean winds as she came on, and leaning forward, flung out both hands in a passionate revelation of sorrow. Mr. Spokesly sat down again, embarrassed and fascinated. He could not take his eyes from her. She was something new in his experience; a woman with passion and the power to express it. Such women are almost non-existent in England, where sentiment is regarded as legal tender for passion. He regarded her with a kind of stupefaction, as though he had never set his eyes on a woman before. One might say with approximate truth that he had not. His ways had lain among the artificial products of his age. In trepidation he realized, as he sat there watching the movements of this girl, that he would not know what to do with a woman like that. He sat there and listened.

"Gone?" repeated Mrs. Dainopoulos.

"Yes, they are all gone. The French sent soldiers. And they would not let me go to speak to him."

"But where will they go?"

The girl, whose eyes were bent upon the carpet at her feet, shrugged her shoulders violently.

"Who knows that? To Sofia; or to Constantinople. Oh, I would have gone, too. These pigs, pigs, pigs of French! Not a word! And he is gone!" She dragged a chair from the table, and sat down suddenly, thrusting her chin over her arm and staring at the floor. There was a moment's silence, while Mr. Spokesly sat in doubt and Mrs. Dainopoulos looked out over the Gulf.

"Gone!" muttered the girl again sullenly.

"Don't do that, dear. It is very bad for you when you get in such rages!" Mrs. Dainopoulos spoke in a soft cool tone, like a recumbent sybil whose knowledge of rage and sorrow was vast. The girl's foot swung to and fro more and more rapidly, the red Turkish slipper slapping the floor, "You will hear from him after a little."

"Ah, if they let him write. But these French! With their beards and hats like cooking pots! They see everything. Of course he will write, but that is no good. He cannot send anything."

An expression of disappointment crossed the other woman's face as she patted the girl's shoulder.

"Wait a little," she said. "You can't tell yet."

"I would have given a thousand drachma to have got to the train," said the girl moodily. "And I would give a million to get to Constantinople. This place stifles me. I hate it ... hate it."

She stood up suddenly, raising her hands to her magnificent coil of dark hair, and revealing the poise and vigour of her body. "Ah!" she moaned, bending over her friend and caressing her. "I am a bad girl, forgetting how ill you are. Evanthia is a bad, bad girl, with her troubles—and you have a visitor——" She turned her head for a moment and Mr. Spokesly was caught unawares in the brilliance of a dazzling yet enigmatic glance from the amber eyes.

"A friend of my husband's," said Mrs. Dainopoulos. "He is English, you know, like me. From London. We have been talking of London."

"Ah, yes!" The lingering syllables were a caress, yet there was no more comprehension in them than in the inarticulate sounds of an animal. The girl bent her dark head over the blonde masses on the pillow. "Forgive your bad girl, Alice."

"Oh, all right," said Mrs. Dainopoulos, emerging with an embarrassed English smile. "Only you must be good now and go back to bed. There's Boris coming in."

"I am going!" said the girl and started. And then she remembered Mr. Spokesly sitting there in dumb stupefaction, his gaze following her, and she turned to make him a bow with a strange, charming gesture of an out-flung hand towards him. The next moment she dragged the door open and passed out.

He looked up to see Mrs. Dainopoulos regarding him thoughtfully, and he made a sudden step forward in life as he realized the ineffectiveness of any words in his vocabulary to express his emotions at that moment. He made no attempt to corrupt the moment, however, which was perhaps another step forward. He sat silent, looking at the glowing end of his cigarette, endeavouring to recapture the facile equilibrium of mind which had been his as he followed Mr. Dainopoulos through the gateway an hour or so before. But that was impossible, for it was gone, though he did not know it, for ever. He was trying to remember the name Mrs. Dainopoulos had called her. Evanthia! And once at the beginning, Miss Solaris. Something like that. Evanthia Solaris. He said to himself that it was a pretty name, and was conscious at the same time of the inadequacy of such a word. There was something beyond prettiness in it; something of a spring morning in the Cyclades, when the other islands come up out of the mist like hummocks of amethyst and the cicadas shrill in the long grass under the almond trees. There was in it an adumbration of youth beyond his experience, a hint of the pulsing and bizarre vitality of alien races, a vitality fretted into white wrath by her will and her desire, as the serene breath of the morning is suddenly lashed into a tempest by the howling fury of an Ægean white squall. She was gone, yet the room was still charged with her magnetic presence, so that Mr. Dainopoulos came in quietly, put down his tweed cap, and seated himself beside his wife, and Mr. Spokesly scarcely noticed his arrival.

As he became aware of outside phenomena once more—and he was rather frightened to discover how his thoughts had flown out into the unknown darkness in search of the girl—he saw that Mr. Dainopoulos was preoccupied and anxious. They were speaking in a low tone and in a foreign tongue, Mr. Spokesly noted. He recalled a story he had read in a magazine some little time before—a story of an Englishman who had a most miraculous command of foreign languages, who overheard a conversation which revealed a plot to destroy the British Army. The plot was revealed by the simple process of torturing a beautiful girl of neutral origin who was to be forced to marry a brutal enemy colonel. It did not occur to Mr. Spokesly to reflect that beautiful girls are usually eager to marry colonels of any denomination, or that colonels do not usually blend love and espionage. But he did notice the extreme improbability of an Englishman being a linguist. It made the tale seem unreal and artificial. Especially when the story added that he was a naval officer of good family who afterwards married the beautiful neutral and settled in a castle in Dalmatia. Fanciful! Mr. Spokesly knew enough of naval officers to doubt the dénouement. He himself, for that matter, would rather live in a bungalow in Twickenham than in Dalmatia. As for foreign girls—he rubbed his chin, puzzled over his own blurred sensations. Mr. Dainopoulos was speaking again. The woman lay back, looking up at the high ceiling, an expression of calm and careful consideration on her face, which was illuminated sharply, like an intaglio, by the lamp. And Mr. Spokesly experienced a shock to discover that they were not speaking of the girl at all. They seemed to have forgotten her existence. They looked at him and so brought him into the conversation.

"I'll have to be getting back," he remarked, rising once more.

Mr. Dainopoulos went to the door and spoke in a low harsh tone into the darkness.

"I'll get you a boat," he said. "There's no boats allowed after dark, but I have a friend on the French Pier. He'll put you on board. Another night, you must come and eat supper. I have had plenty business to-night. I have to go out again later, too. You understand what I tell my wife? Well, the consuls have had to go home. The German and Austrian and Bulgar Consuls went away to-night. I do a good bit of business, you understand, with all these people, and I got to go and see a friend of mine about it. So—will you have coffee——? I'll get you a boat first, and you can come to-morrow night, eh?"

A girl of fifteen with a downcast disdainful countenance came in with a tray and set it on the table. One eyelash flickered towards Mr. Spokesly as she turned and made her way out. He looked at her entranced, noting her slovenly dress, the holes in her stocking, and the ugly slippers that slip-slopped as she moved her small feet. He noted these uncouth garnitures within which she moved with the restless yet indolent rhythm of a captive queen. His mind, as he drank the strong coffee and the tiny glass of cognac, was in a state of unusual exaltation. Never before had he faced an immediate future so fraught with glittering yet unrecognizable possibilities. Mr. Dainopoulos might be a rascal, yet he possessed the power to call up familiar spirits. As he sat there leaning towards the table, his hand abstractedly on the bottle of cognac, thinking deeply of his multifarious concerns, his dexterous dealings in and out among men who slew one another daily, he resembled some saturnine yet benevolent magician about to release a formidable genie who would fill the room with fuliginous vapour. Mr. Spokesly felt his scalp twitching with anticipation. He stepped across to say good-bye to Mrs. Dainopoulos.

"I never expected this," he said simply. "I've had a very pleasant time."

"Come to supper to-morrow," she said, smiling, "Always glad to see anybody from the Old Country."

"Sorry your lady friend couldn't stay," he muttered. "Like to see more of her. Well ... I'll say good-night."

He smiled as he went down the staircase behind the preoccupied Mr. Dainopoulos. He smiled because he could see, by virtue of his exalted mood, that the smug phrases which had always been adequate for his emotions, sounded foolish and feeble. Like to see more of her! Did he? It made him dizzy to think of, though, for all that. It made the simple business of returning to that house an adventure of the soul. Nor did the phrase "lady friend" describe her. He was comfortably vague as to the actual constituents of a lady. A lady was perhaps described as a woman with whom it was impossible to be wholly at ease. Yes, he whispered to himself, but for a different reason. He felt defeated in his attempts to stabilize his impressions. He had no comparisons. It was like comparing a bottle of wine with a bottle of milk. Even Ada.... He moved so abruptly as he followed close on the heels of Mr. Dainopoulos that the latter looked at him in inquiry, and thought a remark was necessary.

"We can fix our little business any time before you go away," he murmured.

But Mr. Spokesly was not thinking of the little business just then. He found himself suddenly confronting the conviction in his mind that his Ada had been little more than a shining reflector of his own image. Ada, in beleaguered England, seemed very far away and her personality lost whatever distinction and magnetism it may have had while he was with her. He saw with perfect clarity a new truth beyond that first one—that Mrs. Dainopoulos had been aware of all this while she had plied her gentle smiling questions. Had she meant anything, then? How could one plumb the mind of a woman? There was something almost sinister in the notion that she had known all along how he was situated, how he felt, and let him sit there while a girl like an indignant enchantress came in and worked some sort of spell upon him. He began to wonder if the girl was real; whether he had not dreamed she was there. He was aghast at the insensibility of Mr. Dainopoulos who was leading the way across the street, his head bent and his damaged features set in a meditative scowl. In what way could one account for it? A woman like that! A woman already with a power over himself that frightened him. Ada! He thought of Ada almost as a refuge from this new emotion assaulting his heart. There was safety with Ada. He knew, within reasonable limits, the range of which she was capable, the tone and timbre of her soul. Here, he comprehended with surprising readiness, he would be called on to do something more than talk conventionally of love. It was all very well, he could see, to jog along from year to year, having a little fun here and there, and getting engaged and even married; but it was no more than the normal function of a human organism. Beyond that he could see something ruthless, powerful, and destructive. He experienced an extraordinary feeling of elation as he walked beside Mr. Dainopoulos towards the street car. He was perplexed because he would have liked to tell Ada the cause of this elation. He had a fugitive but marvellously clear view of Ada's position in the matter. She was away in the future, in a distant and calm region to which he had not yet gained admission. There was something he had to go through before he could get Ada. And while they jangled slowly along the quay, and Mr. Dainopoulos mumbled in his ear the difficulties imposed upon himself by the departure of the consuls, Mr. Spokesly caught a glimpse of what men mean by Fate. Though he knew it not, the departure of the consuls was an event of prime importance to himself. It was an event destined to precipitate the grand adventure of his life. Ada, in beleaguered England, would find her mechanically perfect existence modified by the departure of the consuls. Something he had to go through. He stared out at the shaded lights of the cafés and failed to notice that he no longer desired the tarnished joys of the seafaring boulevardier. Here was a new motive. The facile and ephemeral affairs of his life were forgotten in their sheer nothingness. He drew a deep breath, wondering what lay in store for him.

They left the car and passed through the gates of the dock, along roadways almost incredibly muddy, to where transports worked in the cautious twilight of blue electrics and picket-boats moved up and down gently where they were made fast to the steps, their red and green side-lights giving the quiet stealthy hustle of the quays an air of brisk alertness. Tall negroes, in blue-gray uniforms and red fezzes, moved in slow lines loaded with sections of narrow-gauge track and balks of timber, or pushed trucks of covered material. At a desk in a wooden office sat a French ajutant, a blinding tungsten globe illuminating the short black hairs rucked up over his stiff braided collar and reflecting from an ivory-bald spot on his head as he spoke into a telephone. Mr. Dainopoulos slid sideways into the room and sat down on a bench by the door. The officer's eye flickered towards his visitor and he lifted a hand slightly to indicate recognition. Mr. Spokesly stepped in and sat down. On the wall was a drawing cut from the Vie Parisienne, a nude, with exaggerated limbs and an enormous picture-hat, riding on a motorcycle. The shriek, as of a soul in torment, of a French locomotive, brought a scowl to the officer's face as he conversed with his friends at the Cercle Militaire. Ringing off with a fat chuckle he demanded in rapid French how his old one was making it. The old one, who was Mr. Dainopoulos, made no definite complaint, but commented on the fact that a man could not sit in Floka's and take a little drink with a friend without a certain person, with a luxuriant beard, taking especial note of it. The ajutant threw himself back in his chair, tipped it, his heels grinding the boards, and grunted. That, he mumbled, was only to be expected of Père Lefrote. Well, what was it now? Mr. Dainopoulos indicated his companion, an officer from the English ship arrived to-day, now anchored in the rade. "What ship?" muttered the officer, looking Mr. Spokesly over as though he were some unsavoury mongrel. From Alexandria, said Mr. Dainopoulos, skilfully evading such an impossible word as Tanganyika. "Ah-ha!" crowed the officer, transferring his cold regard to his old one. So the old one was on that game again. By the sacred blue, he was a great old cock. And the officer, getting up, expressed his conviction very fast that if the truth were only revealed, the old one could do a neat business in poulets de luxe as well. What? The truculent officer, halting at the door, his thumb and finger busy with his moustache, looked back over his shoulder at his old one. No, said the latter, he merely repeated what he had said so many times. He knew none of those creatures, though he admitted three had arrived on the transport Jumièges that morning. Was that so? Where were they, then? At the Omphale or the Tour Blanche? Come now! Mr. Dainopoulos lit a cigarette and as he trod carefully on the smoking match murmured his conviction that the ladies, whom a friend of his had seen land at Venizelos Steps, entered automobiles, and might not be found at the Omphale for some time. The officer drummed at the door and nodded. True, but the old one knew of some ravishing creature surely who would respond to the delicate attentions of a lonely exile. A marraine, in fact. But the old one had no such clients. He was a man of business purely. And if it could be arranged his friend here would like to be put on board.

The officer, a frustrated and disappointed sensualist, whose imagination was tantalized but never fed by the fact that he was in the fabled Orient, the abode of lovely Circassians and other houris, nodded agreement. He owed Mr. Dainopoulos a few hundred francs and would have been at a loss even if that gentleman had suddenly produced a beautiful and expensive woman for his amusement. He was ever dreaming of a tremendous affaire, but he was too close-fisted a Norman from Darnetal to spend much on a sweetheart.

"True," he remarked and then called out into the darkness. "Yes," he said, turning his head into the light, "the chaloupe is going off now. Let your friend tell the patron the ship he wants." And he returned to this desk, yawned, and took up a copy of Excelsior. What a life, eh, my old one!

Mr. Spokesly pointed out the black bulk of the Tanganyika, and as the launch slid along the grating, stepped up and reached his room. The night-watchman said, "Chief steward he no back yet." Mr. Spokesly turned in. He switched out his light and lay for a while thinking with more precision and penetration than even the London School of Mnemonics would have ventured to guarantee. He had some difficulty in identifying himself with the man who had gone ashore with Archy Bates that evening. And he slid away into the deep sleep of the healthy seafarer with a novel notion forming at the back of his mind. Suppose he was ashore in Saloniki, what would happen then? If by some turn of the wheel he found himself there? He might be sick, for instance, and go to the hospital and be left behind. There was no dream, but he saw it—a storm and great toil and anxiety, and in the midst of it a girl awaiting the outcome of his exertions with enigmatic amber eyes.

CHAPTER VI

Mr. Dainopoulos afterwards developed into an excellent diplomatist, his principal virtue being a knack of gauging personal values and extracting usefulness from apparently dry husks. He withdrew from the imaginative sensualist who sat during the night in a highly varnished pine shack brooding upon the exasperating proximity of inaccessible seraglios. A useful instrument in many schemes, he did not merit a whole evening. Like most sensualists of the grosser kind he was a bore, and Mr. Dainopoulos had other clients. He picked his way out of the incredible mire of the docks, and crossed over to the cleaner side of the road which extended from Venizelos Street past the Custom House, and which was being extensively remodelled by the army of occupation. Even as Mr. Dainopoulos crossed he could see a number of industrious beings mounted on newly erected telegraph poles, their movements illuminated by small bright lights so that they resembled a row of burning martyrs elevated by some Macedonian tyrant, their cries and contortions as they reached down into the darkness for material and tools recalling the agonies of shrivelling victims. The hotel was in blank darkness. The squirming, writhing exfoliations which constituted the Berlin architect's conception of loveliness showed not a glint of light. One could not believe that it had inhabitants, or that they were alive. Nevertheless, Mr. Dainopoulos halted before the massive double doors and rang the bell, a tall, high-shouldered shade demanding admission to a familiar vault. It was some time after he had relapsed into a motionless silence and an observer might have imagined him to have forgotten his errand, when one of the leaves of the door opened a few inches, and he raised his head. At the sound of his voice the door opened a little more so that he could slide his body sideways through the aperture. Then the door closed behind him and the hotel resumed its appearance of a monstrous Renaissance tomb.

Inside, the night-porter, a person in a slovenly undress of dirty shirt, riding-breeches open like funnels at the knee, and Turkish slippers, yawned and motioned his visitor to a chair while he slowly ascended the stairs, which were lit by a single invisible lamp on the landing. Mr. Dainopoulos remained sunk in thought. It was, in a way, a perfectly honest and rational proposition he had to make, but he found himself involved in some doubt as to the way the person above, an Englishman, would take it. He knew something of the English, being married to one of that race, and he sometimes reflected upon the unexpected workings of their minds. They were oppressively practical and drove wonderful bargains; and then suddenly they would flare into inexplicable passion over something which he for the life of him could not comprehend. If this person upstairs did that, what would it be? Mr. Dainopoulos shook his head. He could not say. He would have to take a chance. He might be tolerated, or sworn at, or laughed at, or arrested, or thrown down the stairs. All these things happened to honest merchandisers, he was well aware. He sometimes watched these English under lowered lids and marvelled. Personally he preferred German or American men. He felt nearer to them, less conscious of a certain incomprehensible reticence of soul which is peculiar to the English, a sort of polite and poignant regret that he should see fit to cumber the earth, which had happened, by a singular and unexplained destiny, to be their heritage. Association with them, under such circumstances as he encountered, was provocative of considerable thought. To men like him, the confused product of a hundred diverging stocks, from Illyrian to Copt, the phenomenon of these blond and disdainful beings, who came always in ships and were apologetic even in their invasions, bore the mark of something supernatural, since the contemplation of them in their own land filled a normal Latin with inarticulate contempt. Mr. Dainopoulos had no pride. He would have found it an embarrassing impediment in his business. But he did devote an occasional moment of leisure to wondering how men could so impose their eccentric habit of thought upon the nations, and why he, for example, should be directed to obtain his personal ideals from a distant island in the northern seas.

The servant appeared on the landing, and Mr. Dainopoulos immediately went up.

The Berlin architect, no doubt in anticipation of invading armies, had exhausted his ingenuity in the façade and the reception rooms, and the chambers above were left in a state of disturbing starkness. Mr. Dainopoulos was led along corridors that chilled the heart with their bare rectangular perspectives, and was halted at length before a door behind which the voices of men could be heard in conversation. And in reply to a knock a slightly querulous voice intoned, "Come in, come in!" as though in infinite but weary patience with elementary intelligences. Mr. Dainopoulos stepped in.

Three men occupied the room. A naval lieutenant sat on the bed smoking a cigarette, a young man who did not raise his eyes to glance at the intruder. The owner of the room was a major, who was seated at a small escritoire near the window, and whose belt and cap hung over a chair. He was a man of thirty-odd, as clean as though he had been scoured and scraped in boiling water, the small absurd moustache as decorative as a nail-brush, and with a look of capable insolence in his blue-gray eyes. A small safe at his side was open and he remained stooping over this as he looked up and saw Mr. Dainopoulos standing by the door. The other man was in civilian tweeds, astride of a chair with his arms on the back, smoking a large curved meerschaum pipe. A clean-shaven circular-faced man of doubtful age, he was the only one of the three who regarded their visitor in a humane manner. He nodded slightly in response to the low bow made by Mr. Dainopoulos on his entry. The latter, however, knew better than to presume on this. He paused until the major invited him to approach, and the major did not do this. He simply waited, leaning over his safe, for Mr. Dainopoulos to explain his intrusion, his existence on earth, and his intentions as to the future, and anything else which might be regarded as extenuating his conduct. When Mr. Dainopoulos remarked that he had called on a little matter of business, the major bent his head again and went on investigating the papers in the safe, as though Mr. Dainopoulos had suddenly and completely evaporated.

"Well," he observed at length, straightening up and laying some papers on his desk, "why do you call on a little matter of business in the middle of the night?" He brought his left arm up in a peculiar whirl to the level of his eyes and looked at his wrist watch. "Eleven-twenty," he added in a tone of detached contempt, and shot a severe look at his visitor.

Mr. Dainopoulos remained standing by the door and maintained his attitude of calm urgency. He explained that the departure of the consuls had led him to remodel his arrangements. All three looked at him with attention when he made this statement. The naval lieutenant, whose work it was to examine and pass all neutral vessels, knew Mr. Dainopoulos very well. To his regret he had never found that gentleman doing anything at all shady, but he had never abandoned his conviction that he would catch him some day. The civilian, who was a censor and decoder of neutral correspondence, was familiar with the Dainopoulos dossier in his office and had read with surprise the chatty letters to girls in London which came from the man's wife. He, however, was not in a position to reveal his knowledge, and looked at Mr. Dainopoulos with good-tempered curiosity. The major, who knew his visitor better than either of the others, having purchased large quantities of stores from him at a handsome profit to the vendor, looked as if he had been insulted when the consuls were mentioned. As well he might, since those astute gentlemen had done their best to keep all possible material out of his hands, had blandly checkmated the armies of occupation at every turn, even preaching a holy war against them among the owners of Turkish baths in the Via Egnatia. They had financed Hellenic Turks who laid injunctions on rights-of-way, issued writs against movement of goods, and sought to inflame French against English and Italian against both. The consuls had been the curse of every executive at Headquarters, for their resources and nerve seemed unlimited. They worked together like a team of experienced crooks on a steamship, and never for a moment were the invaders permitted to forget that the local government was neutral. The major was happier than he had been for a long while, though he lacked the emotional demonstrativeness proper to such a mood. All three of these men, by their reports, had aided in the grand coup which had culminated that evening in the expulsion of the consuls across the frontier. But their first thought, when Mr. Dainopoulos mentioned consuls, was that by some ghastly mischance the consuls had got back into Saloniki and the whole weary business was to begin again.

"Eh?" said the major, snarling up his upper lip so that his moustache looked more like a nail-brush than ever, and looking as if he were about to spring up and fasten his teeth in his visitor's neck. "What's that?"

Thus having evoked a suitable interest in his affairs, Mr. Dainopoulos drew a small notebook from his pocket and began to enumerate the list of goods the sudden departure of the consuls had left on his hands. In the midst of it, the major nodded to a chair and said, "Sit down over here, please." Mr. Dainopoulos came forward, sat down, and proceeded. The naval lieutenant reached over to the dressing table, took up a Turkish dagger and began turning it over in his hands, examining the edge with an intense stare. The censor drew steadily at his pipe and looked Mr. Dainopoulos up and down. He was a novelist, and of the three may be said to have had some practice in the gauging of character. He was aware, in spite of a life spent exclusively in southern England and among one small exclusive caste of English people, that this Levantine might have a view of his own. He was interesting. Where had he picked up that English wife? A slight shudder passed over him in spite of himself at the thought of an English woman in a Levantine's arms. No doubt, however, she was a house-maid or something of that sort. Must be making a lot of money. The censor felt a surge of indignation over this. His own family's resources had been quadrupled by the war; but that of course was the reward of patriotic endeavour. He found it intolerable that a neutral should make money out of bloodshed. Mr. Dainopoulos proceeded as calmly and collectedly as though he were a salesman in Birmingham or Liverpool. He certainly was unaware of inspiring horror and contempt. He even mentioned a thousand yards of Indian cotton drill which he had in his warehouse and which he had purchased for a song from a German firm in Alexandria a few days before the English had sequestered the business. The only point on which he was reticent was the fact that he had already been paid in gold for most of it by the consular agents; a most satisfactory arrangement for him, but unfortunate for them in the present juncture, since they had no receipt and the goods were to be held against their order. There was something exasperating in the spectacle of this man sitting there, with all the marks of clandestine knavery about him, merely offering bona fide goods for sale. He was a Greek in Greece, transacting business which, although he did not yet know it, was of vital importance to them, for a whole string of vessels bound for Saloniki had been sunk inside of two days, from the Start to Karaburun. They were at a loss for a week or so, and a week or so in war is not to be ignored. And here was an unprepossessing person offering them, at a comparatively reasonable rate, a remarkable consignment of material. Apart from their own needs in Macedonia they had recently sent a few thousand men to an island in the Ægean to prepare a base, and the ships bearing their stores were unreported. Sunk, of course. They sat in various poses thinking of all this, and Mr. Dainopoulos closed his notebook and took out a cigarette.

It should be said for him that if he had known their actual position his price would have been slightly higher, just as later on English merchants' prices became so high that men spat at the sound of their names. But he was not a profiteer in the modern sense. He knew nothing of advertising, for example. He thought 100 per cent. an adequate reimbursement for the risks of trade.

He was asked when he could effect delivery. He said in a week or ten days, some of it being on board a steamer on its way now from Alexandria.

"What steamer is that?" demanded the lieutenant.

"The Kalkis, four hundred tons," he replied. "I have had her a year now."

"What speed?"