Command Part 15

"Me too," said his new chief officer, who suddenly felt he needed urgently to meet his own kind again. Mr. Dainopoulos was all right of course, but Mr. Spokesly still retained the illusion that Anglo-Saxon superiority was accepted by the world like gravity and the other laws of nature. It would not do to make himself too cheap, he reflected. He had an unpleasant feeling that his late captain on the _Tanganyika_ would have stared if he had seen his chief officer hobn.o.bbing with a money-changer and a Jewish youth of almost inconceivable honesty and dest.i.tution. Mr. Spokesly's wit, however, was nimble enough now to see that Captain Meredith himself had not always been a quiet, refined, and competent commander; and moreover, Captain Meredith might quite conceivably have seen and taken a chance like this himself, had he been in the way of it. But just now what was wanted was a chat and a drink with a friend. He would go down to the hotel and find the lieutenant.

But this was not to be. As he entered the foyer of the hotel, a major and a round-faced person in civilian clothes regarded him with exaggerated attention. Their protracted examination of him made him feel somewhat self-conscious, and to ease the situation he spoke to them.

"I'm looking for a friend of mine," he said, "a lieutenant in the Harbour Office. I don't know his name."

"Don't know his name!" said the major, boring into Mr. Spokesly with his cold ironical stare.

"I only met him this morning," he explained. "Me coming ash.o.r.e from the _Tanganyika_, you see."

"Oh, yes." This in a more human tone.

"And him being the only man I know, pretty near, I was looking for him."

"I see. Well, old chap, he's generally about pickled this time of day, if he's the man I think you mean. Up at the Cercle Militaire--d'you know it?--or the White Tower Bar. Better take a look along."

"Thanks," said Mr. Spokesly with a slight smile.

"Don't mention it. By the way, are you being sent home?"

"I'm going on a local s.h.i.+p down to the Islands," he replied.

"Not the _Kalkis_?"

Mr. Spokesly nodded, and said he was going mate.

"Well, look here. I'm Officer of Supply, you know. You might look me up--you know where it is--and we'll have a word about the cargo. Yes, in the morning."

The major and his friend the censor, who was also a novelist, gazed after Mr. Spokesly as he went out.

"I believe that fellow Dainopoulos is on the level after all," said the major, drawing hard at his cigarette. "I know his skipper is a Britisher, and this chap's all right, I should say. Well, he's making enough out of it to give us a fair deal."

"Most of these local people are on our side, I think," said the other.

"If we pay them more than the other side," added the major drily. And then they went up to get ready for their dinner.

Mr. Spokesly called a carriage and started along the _quai_. He wondered what they wanted of him about the cargo! Was it possible Captain Rannie was not regarded with complete confidence at headquarters? He recalled the extraordinary reception the Captain had given to his owner when Mr.

Dainopoulos described the undeviating rect.i.tude of his course. Mr.

Spokesly was not simple enough to suppose that the _Kalkis_ was as innocent as she looked in the distance. He knew that the delicate and precarious position of the Allies in Saloniki rendered it necessary to wink at a good deal of adventurous trading in which the local Levantine merchants were past-masters. It could not be helped. But he was puzzled to account for Captain Rannie. How had he come to be in the employ of Mr. Dainopoulos? And what was the lure which held him to a sort of snarling fidelity? Perhaps he also had a tremendous love affair, like Jack Harrowby. Mr. Dainopoulos had hinted at shabby intrigues. Even Mr.

Dainopoulos, however, was not quite on safe ground here. Captain Rannie had his own way of enjoying himself, and an essential part of that enjoyment was its secrecy. He couldn't bear anybody to know anything about him. He was averse, in fact, to admitting that he ever did enjoy himself. It was too much like letting his opponents score against him.

And so people like Mr. Dainopoulos, familiar with evil, imagined the captain to be much more wicked than he ever ventured to be. The drug whose aid he invoked made him look not only aged but sinful as a compensation for the glimpses into the paradise of perpetual youth which it afforded him while he was lying amid huge puffy pillows, in a house near the Bazaar. It gave him genuine pleasure to escape every familiar human eye, and arrive by devious ways at a secret door in a foul alley, which gave on to the back of the house where a quiet, elderly woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter received him and wafted him gently away into elysium. He was a sensualist no doubt, yet it would puzzle a jury of angels to find him more guilty than many men of more amiable repute.

When he sank into one of his torpors, the quiet woman holding his pulse, he felt he was getting even with the wife and daughter who had made him so unhappy in past days. Captain Rannie never did anything without what he called "full warrant." He considered he had full warrant for killing himself with drugs if he wished. He merely refrained out of consideration for the world. Away back in the womb of Time, some forgotten but eternal principle of justice had decreed to him the right to do as he pleased, provided, always provided, he did his duty in his public station. This is a common enough doctrine in Europe and a difficult one to abrogate. Mr. Spokesly, driving along the _quai_ toward the White Tower, would have been the last to deny what Captain Rannie called "a common elementary right." He was invoking it himself. What he was trying to do all this while was to achieve an outlet for his own personality. This was really behind even his intrigue with the London School of Mnemonics. He was convinced he had something in him which the pressures and conventions of the world had never permitted to emerge. It must be borne in mind that the grand ideal of sacrifice which swept over us like a giant wave of emotion at the beginning of the war behaved like all waves. It receded eventually, and those of us whose natures were durable rather than soluble emerged and began to take in the situation while we dried ourselves as quickly as possible. We wondered if there might not be some valuable wreckage was.h.i.+ng ash.o.r.e soon. We got into the universal life-saving uniform, of course, and a.s.sumed conventional att.i.tudes of looking out to sea and acting as chorus to the grand princ.i.p.al performers; but the habits and instincts of generations were too strong for us. We kept one eye on the beaches for wreckage.

Patriotism became an intricate game of bluffing ourselves. We had returned with nave simplicity to the habits of our Danish and Saxon and Norman ancestors. Like the Jews in London who joined l.u.s.tily in the chorus of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," we missed the joke in our furious eagerness to seize the opportunity. But there were many, and Mr.

Spokesly was one, whose acquisitive genius was not adequately developed to deal with all the chances of loot that came by, and who were preoccupied with the fascinating problem of establis.h.i.+ng their egos on a higher plane. Merely becoming engaged had been an advance, for Mr.

Spokesly, because men like him can move neither upward nor downward without the aid of women. Once removed from the influence of Ada by a series of events which he could not control, he was the predestined prey of the next woman ahead. Those who view this career with contempt should reflect upon the happiness and longevity of many who pursue it. Mr.

Spokesly was no sensualist in the strict meaning of the word. He simply experienced a difficulty in having any spiritual life apart from women.

He could do with a minimum of inspiration, but such as he needed had to come from them. All his thoughts cl.u.s.tered about them. Just as he experienced a feeling of exaltation when he found himself in their company, so he could never see another man similarly engaged without regarding him as a being of singular fortune. Always, moreover, he conceived the woman he did not know as a creature of extraordinary gifts. Evanthia Solaris seemed to have eluded cla.s.sification because, without possessing any gifts at all beyond a certain magnetism bewilderingly composed of feminine timidity and tigerish courage, she had inspired in him a strange belief that she would bring him good fortune. This was the kind of woman she was. She went much farther back into the history of the world than Ada Rivers. Ada was simply a modern authorized version of Lady Rowena or Rebecca of York. She accepted man, though what she really wanted was a knight. Evanthia had no use for knights, save perhaps those of Aristophanes. She, too, accepted men; but they had to transform themselves quickly and efficiently into the votaries of a magnetic G.o.ddess. Sighs and vows of allegiance were as nothing at all to her. She had a divinely dynamic energy which set men going the way she wanted. The gay young devil who had been sent packing with the consuls and who was now sitting in his hotel in Pera was wondering at his luck in escaping from her and scheming how to get back to her at the same time. Yet so astute had she been that even now he did not suspect that she was scheming, too, that she was in an agony at times for the loss of him, and talked to Mrs. Dainopoulos of killing herself. She was scheming as she came walking among the gra.s.s-plats at the base of the Tower and saw Mr. Spokesly descend from a carriage and take a seat facing the sea. She came along, as she so often did in her later period, at a vital moment. She came, in her suit of pale saffron with the great crown of black straw withdrawing her face into a magically distant gloom, and holding a delicate little wrap on her arm against the night, for the sun was going down behind the distant hills and touching the waters of the Gulf with ruddy fire. She saw him sitting there, and smiled. He was watching a s.h.i.+p going out, a s.h.i.+p making for the narrow strait between the headland and the marshes of the Vardar, and thinking of his life as it was opening before him. He took out a cigarette and his fingers searched a vest-pocket for matches. They closed on the emerald ring and he held the cigarette for a while unlit, thinking of Evanthia, and wondered how he could make the gift. And as he sat there she seemed to materialize out of the s.h.i.+mmering radiance of the evening air, prinking and bending forward with an enchanting smile to catch his eye. And before he could draw a breath, sat down beside him.

"What you do here?" she asked in her sweet, twittering voice. "You wait for somebody, eh?"

"Yes," he answered, rousing, "for you."

"Ah--h!" her eyes snapped under the big brim. "How do I know you only tell me that because I am here?"

Her hand, gloved in lemon kid, was near his knee and he took it meditatively, pulling back the wrist of it until she drew away and removed it herself, smiling.

"Eh?" she demanded, not quite sure if he had caught her drift, so deliberate was his mood. He took the ring out of his pocket and grasped her hand while he slid the gem over a finger. She let it rest there for a moment, studying the situation. No one was near them just then. And then she looked up right into his face leaning a little towards him. Her voice caught a little as she spoke. It was ravis.h.i.+ng, a ring like that.

For a flicker of an eyelash she was off her guard, and he caught a smoulder of extraordinary pa.s.sion in her half-closed eyes.

"You like me," she twittered softly.

The sun had gone, the gray water was ruffled by a little wind, the wind of evening, and as the guns boomed on the wars.h.i.+ps in the roadstead the ensigns came down.

"You like me," she said again, bending over a little more, for his eyes were watching the s.h.i.+ps and she could not bear it. Suddenly he put his arm across her shoulders and held her. And then he used a strange and terrible expression.

"I'd go to h.e.l.l for you," he said.

She leaned back with a sigh of utter content.

CHAPTER X

He looked down from his window in the morning into a garden of tangled and neglected vegetation sparkling with dew. Over the trees beyond the road lay the Gulf, a sheet of azure and misty gray. He looked at it and endeavoured to bring his thoughts into some sort of practical order while he shaved and dressed. The adventure of the previous evening, however, was so fresh and disturbing that he could do nothing save return to it again and again. At intervals he would pause and stand looking out, thinking of Evanthia in a mood of extraordinary delight.

She must be, he reflected, one of the most wonderful creatures in the world. He had not believed it possible that any woman could so trans.m.u.te the hours for him into spheres of golden radiance. The evening had pa.s.sed like a dream. Indeed, he was in the position of a man whose dreams not only come true but surpa.s.s themselves. His dreams had been only shabby travesties of the reality. He recalled the subtle fragrance of her hair, the flash of her amber eyes, the sensuous delicacy and softness of her limbs and bosom, the melodious timbre of her voice. And he paused longer than usual as he reflected with sudden amazement that she was his for the taking. The taking! How deliciously mysterious she had been as she made it clear he must take her away, far away, where n.o.body knew who she was, where they could be happy for ever together!

How she had played upon the strong chords of his heart as she spoke of her despair, her loneliness, her conviction that she was destined for ill fortune! She injected a strange strain of tragic intensity into the voluptuous abandon of her voice. She evoked emotions tinged with a kind of savage and primitive religious mania as she lay in his arms in the scented darkness of that garden and whispered in her sweet twittering tones her romantic desires. And the thought that she was even now lying asleep in another room, the morning sun filtering through green shutters and filling the chamber with the lambent glittering beam-shot twilight of a submarine grotto, was like strong wine in his veins. She depended on him, and he was almost afraid of the violence of the emotion she stirred in him. She had touched, with the unerring instinct of a clever woman, his imagination, his masculine pride and the profound sentimentalism of his race towards her s.e.x. She revealed to him a phase in her character so inexpressibly lovely and alluring that he was in a trance. She inspired in him visions of a future where he would always love and she be fair. Indeed, Mr. Spokesly's romantic illusions were founded on fact. Evanthia Solaris was possessed of a beauty and character almost indestructible. She was preeminently fitted to survive the innumerable casualties of modern life. She was a type that Ada Rivers, for example, would not believe in at all, for girls like Ada Rivers are either Christian or Hebrew, whereas Evanthia Solaris was neither, but possessed the calculating sagacity of a pagan oracle. Such a catastrophe as the departure of the consuls had enraged her for a time, and then she had subsided deep into her usual mysterious mood. So his illusions were founded on fact. She could give him everything he dreamed of, leaving him with imperishable memories, and pa.s.sing on with unimpaired vitality to adventures beyond his horizon. There was nothing illogical in this. Being an adventuress is not so very different from being an adventurer. One goes into it because one has the temperament and the desire for adventure. And Evanthia was by heredity an adventuress. Her father belonged to that little-known and completely misunderstood fraternity--the _comitadji_ of the Balkans. It is not yet comprehended by the western nations that to a large section of these southeastern people civilization is a disagreeable inconvenience. They regard the dwellers in towns with contempt, descending upon them in sudden raids when the snows melt, and returning to their mountain fortresses laden with booty and sometimes with hostages. They maintain within political frontiers empires of their own, defying laws and defeating with ease the police-bands who are sent to apprehend them.

They have no virtues save courage and occasionally fidelity and no ideals save the acquisition of spoil. They invariably draw to themselves the high-spirited youths of the towns; and the girls, offered the choice of drudging poverty or the protection of a farmer of taxes, are sometimes discovered to have gone away during the excitement of a midnight foray. So had Evanthia's mother, a lazy, lion-hearted baggage of Petritch whose parents had breathed more easily when they were free at last from her incessant demands and gusts of rage. But the man who had carried her off into the mountains was nearing the end of his predatory career, and very soon (for he had no enemies, having killed them all) he was able to purchase a franchise from the Government and turn tax-farmer himself. He was so successful that he became a rich man, and the family, fighting every inch of the way, took a villa in Pera. It was there Evanthia was educated in the manner peculiar to that part of the world. When she was eighteen she could make fine lace, cook, fight, and speak six languages without being able to write or read any at all.

The villa in which they lived was for ever in an uproar, for all three gave battle on the smallest pretext. They lived precisely as the beasts in the jungle live--diversifying their periods of torpor with bursts of frantic vituperation and syncopating enjoyment. Neither European nor Asiatic, they maintained an uneasy balance on the sh.o.r.es of the Bosphorus between the two, until Evanthia's mother, a vigorous, handsome brunette trembling with half-understood longings and frustrated ambitions in spite of her life of animal indolence, suddenly ran away and took her daughter with her. She had fallen in love with a Greek whom she had met in Constantinople, a man of forceful personality, enormous moustaches, and no education, who was selling the tobacco crop from his estate in Macedonia. Evanthia's father, now a man of nearly sixty, did not follow them. He suffered a paroxysm of rage, broke some furniture, and made furious preparations for a pursuit, when one of the servants, a tall, cool Circa.s.sian girl with pale brown eyes and an extraordinarily lovely figure, broke in upon his frenzy and told him an elaborate story of how his wife had really gone to France, where she had previously sent a sum of money, and how she herself had been implored to go with them but had refused to desert her master. It was quite untrue, and took its origin from the French novels she had stolen from her mistress and read in bed; but it hit the mark with the man whose only domestic virtue was fidelity. And the Circa.s.sian creature made him an admirable companion, ruling the villa with a rod of iron, inaugurating an era of peace which the old gentleman had never experienced in his life.

Evanthia had to adjust herself to new and startling conditions. The swart h.e.l.lene stood no nonsense from his handsome mistress. He beat her every day, on the principle that if she had not done anything she was going to do something. When Evanthia began her tantrums he tried to beat her, too, but she showed so ugly a dexterity with a knife that he desisted and decided to starve her out. He cheerfully gave her money to run away to Saloniki, laughing harshly when she announced her intention of working for a living as a seamstress. She arrived in Saloniki to hear stirring news. She was about to enter a carriage to drive to the house of a friend of the h.e.l.lene, a gentleman named Dainopoulos, when a young man with glorious blond hair and little golden moustache, his blue eyes wide open and very anxious, almost pushed her away and got in, giving the driver an address. This was the beginning of her adventures. The young man explained the extreme urgency of his business, offered to do anything in his power if she would let him have the carriage at once.

She got in with him, and he told her his news breathlessly: War. It seemed a formidable thing to him. To her, life was war. She had no knowledge of what war meant to him in his country. To her London, Berlin, Paris were replicas of Constantinople, cosmopolitan rookeries where one could meet interesting men. Saloniki immediately became a charming place for Evanthia Solaris. The young man was the vice-consul.

His father was a wealthy s.h.i.+p-chandler at Stettin, and he himself had been everywhere. It was he who first confirmed her vague gropings after what one might call, for want of a better word, gentility. She was shrewd enough to suspect that the crude and disorderly squabbling in the Pera villa, or the grotesque bullying on the tobacco plantation, were not the highest manifestations of human culture. As has been hinted, she was sure there were people in the world who lived lives of virtuous ease, as opposed to what she had been accustomed. Their existence was confirmed by her new friend. He was the first man she had liked. Later she became infatuated with him. In between these two periods she learned to love someone in the world besides herself.

It would not do to say that she, in her barbaric simplicity, a.s.sumed that all Englishwomen lay on their backs and had angelic tempers. But she did arrive at a characteristically ecstatic conclusion about Mrs.

Dainopoulos. That lady was so obviously, so romantically genteel that Evanthia sometimes wanted to barter her own superb vitality for some such destiny. She never considered for a moment, until she met Mr.

Spokesly, the chances of being adored as Mr. Dainopoulos adored his wife. She knew Mr. Dainopoulos would never dream of adoring a woman like herself. She regarded him with dislike because he betrayed no curiosity about herself and because he obviously knew too much to be hoodwinked by her arts. He even ignored her rather amusing swagger when she paraded her new acquisition, a handsome vice-consul. She knew he would not have tolerated her at all had not his wife expressed a desire to have her remain. Mrs. Dainopoulos had no intention of countenancing evil; but she had been humane enough to see, when Evanthia told her story, how impossible it was for a girl with such a childhood to have the remotest conception of Western ideals. Mrs. Dainopoulos, in fact, belonged to the numerous cla.s.s of people in England who manage "to make allowances," as they call it, for others. And possibly, too, Evanthia, with her bizarre history and magical personality, possibly even her nave a.s.sumption that she was destined to be mistress of men, appealed to the Englishwoman's flair for romance. Evanthia, contrasted with Haverstock Hill, was wonderful. And to Evanthia, the victim of sudden little spurts of girlish posing, pathetic strivings after an imaginary western self, the invalid woman was a sympathetic angel. She never laughed when Evanthia pretended an absurd lofty patriotism or inaugurated a season of ridiculous religious observances, dressing in white and holding a crucifix to her breast. She did not deride Evanthia's remarkable travesty of English dress, or Evanthia's embarra.s.sing concoctions in the kitchen. These gusts of enthusiasm died out, and the real Evanthia emerged again, a velvet-soft being of s.e.x and sinuous delicacy, of no country and no creed, at home in the world, a thing of indestructible loveliness and problematic utility.

And now, while Mr. Spokesly stood at his window gently rubbing his chin and looking down into the dew-drenched garden, Evanthia was lying in another room, smoking a cigarette and meditating. She had a very astute and clearly defined plan in her mind, and she lay thinking how it could be carried out. Unhampered by so many of our modern educational distractions and complexes, her mental processes would have exacted the admiration of the London School of Mnemonics. The apparent impossibility of leaving Saloniki and reaching Constantinople meant nothing at all to her. It had always been an almost impossible task to go anywhere if one were a woman. Women, in her experience, were like expensive automobiles.

They were always owned by somebody, who drove them about and sometimes ill-treated them and even rode them to destruction, and who lost them if they were not carefully guarded. Moreover, the parallel, in her experience, went farther, because she observed that n.o.body ever thought less of them because they were costly to run. Evanthia was now like an ownerless machine of which no one perceived the value or knew how to start. She had been getting accustomed to the notion that independence had its pleasures and defects. She lay thinking with quiet efficiency, until her cigarette was burned down, and then suddenly sprang out of bed. With extraordinary speed and quietness, she rolled up her great ma.s.ses of black hair, slipped into a yellow kimono and Turkish slippers, and went downstairs. The contrast between her pose, with nothing save the slow curl of smoke coming from the deep pillow to show she was alive, and the sharp vitality of her movements in the kitchen, was characteristic. She could not help doing things in a theatrical way. Mr.

Dainopoulos was much nearer the mark than even he knew, when he said in his caustic way that Evanthia imagined herself a queen. There were times when she thought she was an empress walking down ivory staircases strewn with slaughtered slaves. She had a way of striding to the door when she was angry and turning suddenly upon him, her head lowered, her amber eyes full of a lambent, vengeful glare. Mr. Dainopoulos would remain as impa.s.sive as a dummy under this exhibition of temperament, but his att.i.tude was artistically correct. She might be exasperated with him, but she really regarded him as a dummy. He represented the cowed and terror-stricken va.s.sal shrinking from the imperial anger. And now she moved in a majestic way here and there in the great stone kitchen, making black coffee and spooning out some preserved green figs into a plated dish. This she arranged on a tray. In imagination she was a great lady, a grand-d.u.c.h.ess perhaps, taking refreshment to a secret lover. She loved to figure herself in these fantastic roles, the roles she had seen so often at the cinemas. The exaggerated gestures and graphic emotions came naturally to a girl at once theatrical and illiterate. She walked away with the tray in her hand, ascending the stairs as though rehearsing an entrance, and stood stock still outside Mr. Spokesly's door, listening.

Mr. Spokesly was listening, too. He had heard the slip-slop of the loose slippers, the tinkle of spoon against china, and then a faint tap. He went over to the door and pulled it open.

"You!" he said, with a thrill. He could not have said a word more just then. She smiled and held a finger to pursed lips to enjoin silence. He stood looking at her, hypnotized.

"Drink coffee with me?" she whispered sweetly, holding up the tray. And then she moved on along the pa.s.sage, looking back over her shoulder at him with that smile which is as old as the world, the first finished masterpiece of unconscious art.