Captain Macedoine's Daughter Part 13

"'That is easy,' he smiled. 'It is Kinaitsky. I am equally guilty--more so, for I am not certain whether I have seen you....' he paused as he pa.s.sed me some cigarettes.

"'At the ---- Hotel in London,' I suggested. He pondered for a moment, observing me intently.

"'It would be as well to give me the details,' he remarked. 'Since you are about to do me a valuable service, I should know to whom I am indebted.'

"I told him. He remained silent for quite a while and I sat enjoying a perfect cigarette and an almost equally perfect gla.s.s of wine. At length he said:

"'And I understand that your interest in this lady has led you here?'

"'Oh, no,' I a.s.sured him. 'People in my walk of life can't do things like that. It just happens my ship's charter was changed, that is all.

You can call it good luck, if you like, or bad.'

"'Pardon,' he said, studying me and feeling in the pocket of his overcoat, 'but I am not clear yet just what your intentions are.'

"'I don't know myself,' I answered, foolishly. 'I must see her first.

You understand, she wants to see me, as a friend.' He smiled and became grave again at once.

"'I,' he remarked, stiffly, 'have not seen her since my marriage. I allow her an income, of course. I regard that as a simple duty to those who have been under my protection. I may tell you, Monsieur, that she is quite free to dispose of herself.... But things are very unsettled here, as you may know. I have large interests which involve me in political affairs. This present affair is of that nature. And I may observe that you were good enough to say you recognized the man who escaped in that boat. I am at a loss to understand how this can be, but let that pa.s.s.

Who was he?'

"'I was talking to him only to-day,' I returned. 'He calls himself Stepan Nikitos, and he told me he wrote articles on internationalism in a paper called the _Phos_. He is the sort of man who would write fluently no doubt on internationalism, for he seems to be an Egyptian Greek with a strain of Armenian in him. Personally, I believed him to be simply a runner for a ship-chandler of whom perhaps you have heard--Captain Macedoine.'

"M. Kinaitsky sat with one arm on the little table between us and regarded me from under sharp black brows with motionless interest. As I mentioned the name of Captain Macedoine he stroked his moustache, and then drew his other hand from his pocket and placed on the table a heavy American revolver.

"'Pardon,' he said, 'but I am unable to see how you come to know this Nikitos.... Oh, he is a ship-chandler, you say. Well, he may be that also. But you are not conversant with affairs here or you would appreciate the danger of being friendly with internationalists. That by the way. Your friend,' he went on with gentle irony, 'came here to-night with three men such as can be hired for a few _drachma_ in any of the alleys of the _Cite Saul_, to obtain some important doc.u.ments from my safe. Unfortunately for them the safe is of the latest London pattern with a time-lock, which I bought when in England last year. They only succeeded in alarming my servants and we secured the three men. The leader, this Nikitos, who is well-known as one of those who sell information to the h.e.l.lenic Government, a spy and a harbour pimp, escaped. A most unfortunate accident.'

"'But what harm can such a disreputable being do to a man like you?' I enquired in astonishment. M. Kinaitsky spun the chambers of the revolver with his finger.

"'It is impossible,' he observed, calmly, 'to conceive of a state of things in which a disreputable being can not do harm to one who cherishes his reputation. Consider----' he went on, his finger leaving the weapon and levelled at me. 'He has nothing to lose. He is the dupe of desperate and cunning persons who wish to destroy the government. He is poor, and he probably is driven by some woman to obtain money for her gratification at all costs.'

"'No,' I said. 'You don't know M. Nikitos. He has a very peculiar att.i.tude toward women. You might almost call him vociferously virtuous.

Perhaps,' I added, 'you do not know either that he was supposed to marry Captain Macedoine's daughter? She turned him out. They were on the Island of Ipsilon together.'

"I don't know," said Mr. Spenlove, "how I expected him to take this, but I was surprised at his composure. I did not take into adequate consideration the fact that women were not the same phenomena to him that they were to me. I forgot the 'four others' who were being kept in loose boxes, so to speak, out of a deference to that complex yet extremely admirable reluctance of his to abandon those who had reposed in the broad shadow of his protection and who had been honoured by his august notice. I have never been able, by the by, to make up my mind whether I myself admired or loathed this singular idiosyncrasy.

"'You mean,' he questioned, quietly, 'that she was his mistress on the island?' I shook my head.

"'No,' I said, 'that's the very thing I don't mean. And as I told you, Nikitos has not that temperament. He makes rather a hobby of his own chast.i.ty.'

"M. Kinaitsky regarded me with interest. 'I mean,' I added, 'his emotions are his mistresses, so to speak. There _are_ some men,' I went on in doubtful fashion, 'to whom women make no positive appeal. But perhaps....'

"'Oh, undoubtedly!' he startled me by agreeing with sudden emphasis.

'Undoubtedly! But if not women, what?' he demanded.

"'Well,' I said, slowly, 'he struck me as being just what you describe him--in with some political crowd. I don't speak the language, you must remember, and have only a hazy notion of what all this trouble is about, but in the _Cafe Odeon_ I gathered from various obscure hints that he was part of the show. And another thing, Monsieur, he certainly gave me to understand that he meditated some sort of revenge upon the person who had robbed him of this girl. That was how he put it, you know. He is quite unable to believe that she detested him. He is ignorant of the details of her life lately, I may say. He even suspected me of having abducted her. Made some very violent threats, but I put that down to his mania for long words.'

"M. Kinaitsky looked at me with grave concern.

"'This is very serious,' he remarked at length, 'very serious. It is only a matter of days, hours, before he learns anything he wishes. The government at Constantinople have been most negligent in their att.i.tude toward the revolutionary leaders here.'

"'What alarms you?' I enquired.

"'Everything!' he returned, getting up and walking to and fro on the polished parquetry flooring, his arms folded, his head bent.

'Everything!' He halted suddenly in his advance toward the far end of the room which opened upon a small byzantine balcony and looked at me over his shoulder.

"'I believe,' he said, slowly, 'that you are entirely trustworthy----'

"'I feel flattered,' I murmured.

"'But for one thing,' he went on, 'I cannot account to myself for your connection with Mademoiselle Macedoine. I ask myself--what is he doing there? I cannot answer.'

"'Why are you so anxious about a thing like that when you have so many cares?' I demanded.

"'Because,' said he, 'I wish to make use of you. The news you bring me to-night is, to me personally, by reason of my position here as an Ottoman subject, extremely important. I propose to you that you take a package of papers to my brother in London. I shall leave for Constantinople by the four o'clock train to-morrow. If you will call here at three to-morrow I will have them ready for you and will see you safe to your ship where no doubt you have a safe on board. I can a.s.sure you that when you deliver these papers to my brother he will reimburse you for your trouble. Or if you prefer----'

"'No,' said, 'I will do it with pleasure for nothing.'

"'Impossible,' he retorted, gravely, coming up to the table again. 'It is a commission and will be generously rewarded.'

"'You antic.i.p.ate trouble then?' I suggested.

"'Monsieur,' said he, 'I antic.i.p.ate the worst kind of trouble. I have known of it for some time, but the happenings of to-night prove that I was mistaken as to the time.'

"'It will be better if I know nothing about it,' I said. 'I will call at three or earlier. I have an appointment ash.o.r.e to-morrow afternoon but I can come here first.'

"'You go to Mademoiselle Macedoine, perhaps?' I nodded. 'Give her my respects,' he murmured, regarding me steadily. 'My respects. It would be impertinent no doubt to refer again to your own future movements?'

"And you know," said Mr. Spenlove, breaking off in his narrative abruptly, "I had no words to reply. I was stricken with a species of intellectual consternation at the incredible gulf which separated me from that man emotionally. I was staggered by the vision which persistently came before me of those four unknown women, quite possibly beautiful young women, though of this I had no actual proof, dwelling in discreet seclusion and serving no useful purpose in the world beyond the gratification of a plutocrat's ego-mania. If that can be called useful.

And there was also, in addition to these, this girl whom I knew. Five of them: and they were not even permitted to be wicked! And I had to wrestle with this outrageous problem of our relative status as human beings at the same time that my own att.i.tude toward this girl was a.s.suming an intensely personal character. My soul, or that fugitive and ineluctable ent.i.ty which does duty for a sailorman's soul, was stamping up and down inside of me, waving its arms, protesting with all its suddenly released energy against this man, denying him any knowledge of what we call love, at all. I wanted to a.s.sail him with denunciations for the monstrous self-esteem which sentenced those delicate creatures to a shadowy and volitionless stagnation. I accused him of the destruction of their immortal souls, forgetting in my romantic warmth that in all probability he didn't believe they had any. But of course, being an Englishman, I remained perfectly quiescent and inarticulate. I believe I reached for another cigarette before picking up my hat. And I dare say I smiled. We have peculiar ways of defending ourselves in such crises. He a.s.sumed a puzzled air as he held out his hand.

"'Englishmen are ice,' he remarked, 'where women are concerned. I have frequently observed it. _Sang froid_ as we say in French. The phrase must have been inspired by the contemplation of an Englishman....'

"'And we shook hands. I said nothing, which doubtless confirmed him in his illusions about us. But the point is, I was equally mistaken about him, I could not believe him capable of what we call love. I was, as I say, mistaken. But as I followed him out to the front of his house, where his patient minions waited with lanterns which shed flickering rays over enormous shrubs and about the trunks of tall cypresses, and stood at length beside a fantastic barouche, with a sleepy driver on the box, I had a moment of illumination. I asked myself why I applied this test of love to a man like him, a man in the midst of extraordinary predicaments--a man who perhaps had suffered the pangs of h.e.l.l for love and had recovered, who quite possibly had run up and down the whole gamut of human emotions while I was idiotically spending my years tinkling on a couple of notes. The stupid injustice of my interior anger came home to me, and I sought again for the reason why I demanded of him my own occidental idealism. The answer struck me as unexpectedly as a sudden blow. It was because of my own att.i.tude toward the girl. As I took my seat in the carriage and reached out mechanically to shake hands once more, I saw her as clearly as though she were there before me, the bought chattel of a cultivated polygamist, and the blood rushed to my head in a sudden surge. I leaned back as the horses started at the crack of the whip. I felt sick and humiliatingly impotent. I saw Love and Romance for what they are in this iron world of ours--ragged outcasts shivering in the streets, the abject dependents of the rich. And I saw myself for what I was, too, for the matter of that, a reed shaken by the winds of desire, an emotional somnambulist terrified at the apparition of his own destiny."

"No," said Mr. Spenlove in reply to a murmured protest, "I am not libelling humanity at all. We are a very fine lot of fellows, no doubt.

As I mentioned a little while ago, the new generation seem to be a distinct advance in evolutionary types over us older and more imperfect organisms. To watch a modern youth with a woman, to hear him recount his extensive and peculiar experiences with women, to study his detached and factory-built emotions toward women--the outcome of our modern craze for quant.i.ty-production, is an instructive and somewhat alarming pastime for one weathering middle age. An improvement, of course. All progress means that, I am informed. But I am not telling you the adventures of a super-man, only a super in the play. What? No, I didn't run down love, as you call it, at all. My quarrel was not with love, or even the s.e.xual manifestation of it which pre-occupies you all so much. I simply doubted your knowledge of it. I suggested that the majority of men never know very much about it save in a scared and furtive fashion. I hinted that you never fully realized the terrific importance of romantic ideas in the world; that you make a joke of the whole business, filling your rooms with pictures of well-nourished young women in amorous poses, filling your minds with mocking travesties and sly anecdotes of those great souls who have left us the records of their emotional storms and ship-wrecks. I am telling you the story of Captain Macedoine's daughter. Eh? Well, I am coming to that ... it seems we shall be here till morning.

"It once occurred to me," he went on, meditatively, "that a good deal of the unreality of people in books is due to the h.o.m.ogeneity of their emotions. A man in love, for example, is in love right to the end, or to the point where the mechanism of the story renders it necessary to introduce another state of affairs. Anybody who has been in love, or cherished a hatred, or espoused a doctrine, or done anything invoking the deep chords, knows that this is not so. There is the reaction. When I got aboard the _Manola_ once more and stood in the middle of my stuffy little cabin on the port side of the engine hatch, I was a cold and discouraged pessimist. The oil lamp on my table showed me my domain. A c.o.c.kroach was making its way methodically round and round a covered plate of sandwiches, while its brother or possibly a distant relation was enjoying a good tuck-in of the cocoa at the bottom of a cup. Down below I heard the bang of a bucket, and I reflected that the donkeyman, after cleaning his fires and sweeping his tubes, was washing himself in the stoke-hold. The night watchman in the galley was drying heavy flannels over the stove and the warm, offensive odour hung in the air.

On the big mirror which I have mentioned, I saw a memorandum written with a piece of soap: 'Steering Gear.' I recalled that I must get the Mate to take up the slack in his tiller-head in the morning. I was overwhelmed with the hard, gritty facts of existence, an existence the most discouraging and drab on earth I imagine, unless one has some fine romantic ideal before one. And I stood there, irresolute, looking at my figure in the gla.s.s, which reminded me of a badly painted ancestral portrait, and wondered whether I was capable of a fine romantic ideal.

There lies the trouble with most of us, I fancy. We lose our youth and we fail to lay hold of the resolution of manhood. And before we know it we have drifted moodily into forlorn by-ways of sensuality....

"Because I knew that if I went to see that girl next day I could no longer maintain a detached air of being a kind of benevolent and irresponsible guardian. All the unusual and melodramatic happenings of the evening were unable to blind me to the basic fact that our relations had changed, and I dared not follow them, even in thought, to their logical consequences. And yet I dared not retreat. I had that much imaginative manhood! I could not face a future haunted by her questing, derisive, contemptuous smile. As I lay down and watched the lamp giving out its last spasmodic flickers before it left me in darkness, I thought I saw her, say a year hence, in a vague yet dreadful environment, halting her racing thoughts to remember for a moment the man who had failed her in a time of need. I saw the shrug and the sudden turn of the shoulders, the curl of the lip, the evanescent flash of the eyes.... No, I couldn't do it. And I couldn't forego the exquisite seduction of a future glowing with the iridescent colours of romantic folly....

"And so," said Mr. Spenlove, after one of his pauses, "I went."