Command Part 35

"Oh, the British give me the paper for a big cargo I got for 'em. You count this, now: _Thirty--five--thousand--pound_. Eh? Ha--ha!" He leaned forward and covered her hands with kisses murmuring: "My little wife! My little wife! What shall I buy my little English wife, eh?"

And when Mr. Spokesly asked Evanthia if she would forget it all when she got to England she stood by the table, stricken to a sudden and mysterious immobility and regarded him with wide amber-coloured eyes.

Then she lifted a finger to her lips.

There was a noise below. The iron gate banged. Evanthia, her finger to her lips, her eyes shining like stars, came to the window and leaned over. "Art thou come back?" she called in Greek. And the voice of the young Jew replied:

"Here I am, Madama. I am returned from the city."

"Any news of the Franks at Aidin?" she asked, smiling at Mr. Spokesly where he sat in silent admiration.

"They are here, Madama. Three, one of them the man you described to me, young and full of laughter."

"_Aiee!_ A good servant thou art. I will keep thee always." She turned to her lover.

"Ah, yes!" she sighed. "A house like this in England. And I have forgot Saloniki now. Supper is ready, _mein Lieber_."

CHAPTER XVI

Years afterwards, when Mr. Spokesly, a cool and established person in authority in a far distant territory, would turn his thoughts back occasionally to the great period of his life, he would wonder how long it might have lasted had he not gone into the city that calm evening, had he never met that gay and irrepressible young man. There was no bitterness in his reflections. He saw, in that future time, how far removed from the firm sh.o.r.es of reality he and Evanthia were floating, his romantic exaltation supporting them both while she watched him with a suspicion of amazement in her eyes.

For there was a point in that period in the white stone house on the mountain side, high above the village in the quiet valley, when Evanthia herself wondered what was going to happen. She trembled for a while upon the verge of acceptance and surrender. They would go, she submitting to his command, and take that chance together which he was for ever picturing in his mind as a rush for freedom and ultimate happiness.

Almost she lost that poise of spirit which enabled her to mystify and subjugate him. Almost she succ.u.mbed to the genius and beauty of the place, to the intensity of his emotions and the romantic possibilities of the future he desired to evoke. For one brief moment, so swiftly obliterated that he was hardly aware of it before it was gone, she saw herself united to him, thinking his thoughts, breathing his hopes, facing with her own high courage the terrors of life in an unknown land, for ever. He remembered it (and so did she) for many years, that one ineffable flash of supreme happiness when their spirits joined.

They had been down the steep hillside and across the Cordelio road to the sh.o.r.e where there stood a blue bath house built out over the water.

As they had scrambled and slid among the shingle and loose boulders, the upper reaches of the mountains touched to glowing bronze by the setting sun while they were in a kind of golden twilight, there came a call from the next house and they saw a white figure at the heavy iron gate in the garden wall. And by the time they were among the houses of the village and stared at by the shy, silent housewives who were gathered about the great stone troughs of the wash house, they were joined by Esther, Evanthia's friend. And together the three of them, with towels and bathing suits, went down to the blue bath-house as the spa.r.s.e lights of the city began to sparkle across the water.

Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She traversed every one of his preconceived notions of a Jewess and of a Russian, yet she was both. She had come down from Pera with her Armenian husband, a tall, thin, dark man with a resounding and cavernous nose, who held a position in what he called the Public Debt. He had come over with her one evening and paid an extremely formal call, presenting his card, which bore the words "Public Debt" in one corner below his polysyllabic name. Mr. Spokesly liked Esther. She was a vigorous, well-knit woman of thirty, with an animated good-humoured face and capable limbs. He liked her broken English, which was uttered in a hoa.r.s.e sensible voice. He liked her because she was a strong advocate of his. He heard her muttering away to Evanthia in a husky undertone and he was perfectly well aware that she was taking his part and proving to Evanthia that she would be a fool if she did not stay by him. She would talk to him alone, too, and repeat what she had said.

"You take her away," she urged. "Soon as you can. Me and my 'usban', we go to Buenos Aires soon as we can. This place no good."

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

"She say yes? She say anything. She like to fool you. I know. I tell her--you stay wis your 'usban'. Englishmen good 'usban's, eh?"

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

For an instant Esther's firmly modelled and sensible features a.s.sumed an expression inexplicable to the serious man watching them. For an instant she was on the verge of telling him the truth. But Esther was empirically aware of the importance of moods in the development of truth; and she said with great heartiness: "I am tellin' you, yes! She come. I make her! But how you get away from here? You gotta wait till the war finish. And where go? Germany?"

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

Esther looked at him then with some curiosity. She had all the news from Constantinople, and in the light of that news it seemed incredible to her that any one should doubt the triumph of the Central Powers. There would be nowhere else to go, in her opinion, unless one fled to America.

"Home, of course," he had said, and of a sudden had experienced an almost physical sickness of longing for the humid foggy land in the Northern Sea, the land of dark green headlands showing chalk-white below, of hedges like thick black ropes on the landscape, with sunken roads between, of little towns of gray and black stone with the dark red roofs and stumpy spires against the sky of clouds like heaps of comfortable cushions. He had been amazed at her cool suggestion that they go to Germany, and she had been amazed at him. For she had all the news from Constantinople, news that told her that the British fleets were at the bottom of the sea, that the millions in England were starving, the King fled to America, and that the great Kaiser in his palace in Berlin was setting out on his triumphal march to London to be crowned Czar of Europe. And why then should he not go to Germany? That was what she would do. She looked at him curiously as he said "Home!"

not understanding, of course, the meaning of the word. She had a house, but the subtle implications of the word home, the word saturated with a thousand years of local traditions and sympathies, the word that is the invisible centre of our world, she did not comprehend. For her, patriotism was a dim and unfamiliar perplexity. She had no abstract ideas at all. She could not read very well. She personified the things in her heart. To her they were men as real as her husband and Mr.

Spokesly himself. Husband, house, money, sun, moon, sea, and earth--on these concrete manifestations of existence she based an uncurious philosophy. And it must be understood that love was very much the same.

Esther had none of Evanthia's untutored theatricality. She never saw herself as the Queen of Sheba or the mistress of a King. She had had a pretty hard life of it in Odessa as a child, and when she was fifteen she began to divide men into two main cla.s.ses, the generous and the stingy. It never entered her head she could live without being dependent upon men. And then she made a fresh discovery, that generous men were often foolish and spent their money on women who were monsters of infidelity. Esther was faithful. Even when she was left with a baby and no money, when she was under no obligation to treat men with consideration, she remained one of those who keep their word out of an allegiance to some obscure instinct for probity. And now she was married to her Armenian, a serious creature with vague longings after Western ideas or what he imagined were Western ideas. She was conscious of both love and happiness as tangible facets of her existence. She had hold of them, and in her strong capable hands she turned them to good account.

She liked Evanthia because she had that ineluctable quality of transfiguring an act into a grandiose gesture. When Esther's little boy came on Sunday to visit his mother, it was Evanthia who swooped upon him, crushed him to her bosom with an exquisitely dramatic gesture of motherhood, stroked his sleek dark head and smooth little face, and forgot all about him an hour later. Esther never did that. When she looked at her son she seemed to see through the past into the future.

Her kind capable face was grave and abstracted as she watched him. She seemed to be apprehensive of their security. Her husband did not dislike the child. But if they could only get to Buenos Aires!

She came with them now and soon they were in the water racing to the end of the jetty and diving into the flickering green transparency towards the white sand bottom. He watched the two of them sometimes, while he sat on the jetty and they tried to pull each other under, noting the differences of their characters and bodies. Esther was something beyond his past experience. She had the st.u.r.dy muscular form of a strong youth and the husky voice of a man. As she climbed up towards him, the water glistening on the smooth sinewy arms and legs, and as she shook the drops from her eyes with a boyish energy and seating herself beside him accepted a cigarette, he was conscious of that delicious sensuous emotion with which a man regards the friend of his beloved without invalidating for a moment his own authentic fidelity. His love for one woman reveals to him the essential beauty of all women. And it was characteristic of Evanthia to swim back to the bath-house steps and go in to dress, leaving them there to talk for a moment.

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

"He go to some club," she said, blowing a jet of smoke upwards. "He very fond of his club. He read plenty book, my 'usban'."

"What sort of books?"

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

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

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

Esther laughed, a low husky chuckle, as she rose, flung away the cigarette and ran back to the bath house.

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

He knew by now that she meant "very much"; and as he followed her he agreed she was right. He had reached that stage when the past and the future were both obliterated by the intense vitality of existence. Only the never-ending desire to get her away into his own environment, to see her against a familiar background, held him to the plan he had worked out to get away. And it was the source of much of his irony in later, more prosperous years that he had come to see how essentially egotism and male vanity that never-ending desire happened to be. He saw the sharp cleavage, as one sees a fault in a range of cliffs at a distance, between his love and his pride. He saw that the fear in his heart was for himself all the time, lest he should not come out of the adventure with his pride entire.

But that evening he was absorbed in his emotions, saturated with the rich and coloured shadows of the valley, the tremendous loom of the mountains and the vast obscurity of the sea. And as they crossed the road he put his hand on her shoulder while Esther moved on ahead in the dusk to prepare the evening meal. And they stood for a moment in the road, facing the huge lift of the earth towards the great golden stars, silent in the oncoming darkness. They heard the deep booming bark of a watch-dog far up the valley, a sound like the clang of metal plates on earthen floors. She looked at him with a characteristic quick turn of the head, her body poised as though for flight.

"Promise you will come," he said thickly, holding to her tightly as though she were the stronger. "Can't you understand? I _must_ go, and I can't go without you, leave you here. Promise!"

She watched him steadily as he said this, her eyes bright in the dusk and charged with that enigmatic expression of waiting and of knowledge beyond his imagining. It almost took her breath away at times, this consciousness of events of which he knew nothing. He wanted her to go with him to that terrible distant land where already the mult.i.tudes, starved out by the victorious Germans, were devouring their own children, even carrying their dead back in ships.... And he did not know.

"Promise!" he muttered, straining her to him. She looked up the dim dusty road, along which weary hearts had wandered for so many centuries, and a sudden wave of pity for him swept over her. She saw him for a moment as a pathetic and solitary being trembling upon the brink of a tragic destiny, a being who had come up out of the sea to do her bidding and who would sail out again into the chaos of tempests and war, and vanish. And it was her sudden perception of this dramatic quality in their relations that brought about the brief pa.s.sionate tenderness. It was her way, to give men at the very last a perfect memory of her, to carry away with them into the shadows.

"Yes," she said gently, and her strong and vigorous body relaxed against his as he held her close. "How could you leave me here, alone? _Mon Dieu!_ We will go!"

And for a moment she meant it. She meant to go. She saw herself, not in England it is true, but as the central figure in a gorgeous pageant of fidelity, a tragic queen following a beggar man into captivity in a strange land of her own bizarre imagining. They stood in the road for a while, he staring at the stars rising over the dark summits and she looking up the road into the dusk at a mysterious drama playing away in the brightness of the future. And then the moment was past, and neither of them comprehended just then how far their thoughts had gone asunder.

And she was sincere in that exclamation, when she asked how he could leave her there alone? For she was alone. The young Jew trotted to and from the town bearing fragments of news, like a faithful dog carrying things in his mouth, but he had given her nothing as yet that const.i.tuted certainty. She trembled within the circle of the arm that held her as she suddenly saw herself--alone. She must keep him there yet a little longer. And as they climbed up the gully and reached the iron gate in the garden wall, the tears started to her eyes. He saw them in the light of the lamp in the kitchen and kissed her with a fresh access of emotion. He did not imagine the cause of them. She stared at him through their brightness and smiled, her bosom heaving. She knew he would never never realize they were tears of anger, and were evoked by the perception of the helplessness of women in a world of predatory men.

But above and beyond this terrible abstract indignation she found herself regarding him at intervals with smouldering eyes because of a certain subtle complacency in his manner. She could not know that this was the habit of years, or that men of his race are invariably complacent in the presence of their women. She could not conceive him in any role in which he had the right to be complacent. Yet he combined it with a tender humility that was very sweet to her in her situation out there on the hillside, playing for a hazardous stake. It was then she would look at him in stupefaction, wondering if she were going mad, and she afterwards would take the young Jew by the hair, dragging his head this way and that, and mutter between her clenched teeth: "_Mon Dieu! Je deteste les hommes!_" And he, poor youth, would a.s.sume an expression of pallid horror, for he had no idea what she was talking about, and imagined he had failed to carry out some of her imperious commands.

"Oh, Madama, what has thy servant done to deserve this?" he would whimper, less certain than ever of the solidity of his fortunes. And she would look at him, her hand dropping to her side as she gave a little laugh.

"Did I hurt you?" she would chuckle, and he would explain that she had not.

"But when Madama speaks in that strange tongue her servant is afraid he has not done his errand in the town as she desires."

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

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