Command Part 36

"And some great fool of an Osmanli soldier would go through thy pockets, and lock thee up in the jail on Mount Pagos with all the other Jews. And who would write the letter? You? Can you write?"

"Very little, Madama," he muttered, trembling.

"And I cannot write at all, though I don't tell anybody. I could never learn. I read, yes; the large words in the cinemas; but not letters. Let us forget that. You have the picture?"

"Ah, Madama, it is next my heart!"

He would bring it out, unfolding a fragment of paper, and show her a photograph about as large as a stamp, and she would glower at it for a moment.

"You are sure he is not at the Hotel Kraemer?"

"Madama, one of the maids there is of my own people, the Esken.a.z.i, and she has a.s.sured me there is no one like the picture there. But the general will arrive in a day or two. Perhaps he is a general, Madama?"

he hinted.

"He? Not even a little one! Ha--ha!" she chuckled again. "The dear fool!

But hear me. He may be with the general. He may be what they call an _aide_. He may...." She broke off, staring hard at the youth, suddenly remembering that he might not come at all. "Go!" she ordered absently, "find him and thy fortune is made."

But the idea of a letter was attractively novel to her, and she immediately saw herself inspiring the dear fool with some of her own grandiose ideas. She even thought of sounding Esther upon the likelihood of her husband writing a letter. She stood by the window looking down into the garden where Mr. Spokesly sat smoking and gazing at the blue bowl of the gulf and the distant gray-green olive groves beyond the city. She was deliberating upon the significance of her courier's latest breathless news from the kitchen of the Hotel Kraemer. The general was arriving from the south. He and his staff had been as far as Jerusalem after the great victory over the British and were due to-morrow in the city on their way back to Constantinople. Evanthia's courage had suffered from the contradictory nature of her earlier news. It was part of her life to sift and a.n.a.lyze the words that ran through city and country from mouth to mouth. She had never had any real confidence in any other form of information. If she hired any one to write a letter, her words vanished into incomprehensible hieroglyphics and she had no guarantee the man did not lie. And when Amos had told her on the ship what he had heard in the Rue Voulgaroktono that they had reached Aidin, she had jumped to the conclusion that Lietherthal was with a party on their way from Constantinople to Smyrna. And now her quick brain saw the reason why they had not arrived before. He had joined the staff of the general and had gone away south, through Kara-hissar, to Adana and Aleppo to Damascus. And now they were on their way back. She looked down into the garden, where Mr. Spokesly, quietly smoking, was reflecting upon the mystery of a woman's desires. Here, after all, she had forgotten all about that other fellow, who was probably having a good time in Athens and who had no doubt forgotten about her. And she was alone here, utterly dependent upon him, who had made his plans for taking her away to a civilized country, where he could make her happy.

He smiled with profound satisfaction as he thought of himself with her beside him, in London. How her beauty would flash like a barbaric jewel in that gray old city! He remembered the money she had stowed away, ready for the great adventure. He called it that in romantic moments, yet what was more easy than running out after dark, with nothing fast enough to catch him? Especially as he heard that there would be a review in a day or so when everyone would be on their toes to see the general.

He thought of the money because even in his romantic moments there was enough to live on for a year "while he looked round." No more second-mate's jobs, he muttered. He would pick and choose. He rose and stretched luxuriously, noting the calm glitter of the city's lights like a necklace on the bosom of the mountain. He would have to spend an evening with that chap Marsh. Very decent fellow. Had pressed him more than once to join them at Costi's in the Rue Parallel. He was satisfied apparently, married to his Armenian wife and teaching music and languages to earn a living for a large family. Mr. Spokesly recalled a remark made by Mr. Marsh one day at the Sports Club: "Oh! Don't misunderstand me! For myself, as regards the war, you know, I am a philosopher. What can we do? Ask any fair-minded person at home, what could they do, in our position? There's only one answer--make the best of it. Don't misunderstand us."

And he had ventured a remark that possibly they, and the fair-minded person at home, might misunderstand him, coming into an enemy port like that.

"Oh, no!" Mr. Marsh was untroubled by that. "You were like us, as far as I can make out. Had to make the best of it. Now your captain...."

There was a fascination about the captain for Mr. Marsh. For twenty years he had lived in a sort of middle-cla.s.s and inconspicuous exile, and destined, as far as he could discover, to remain for ever in the dry and unromantic regions of a middle-cla.s.s existence. Nothing, he was often fond of saying to his friends, ever happened to him. The things one reads of in books! he would exclaim, with a short grunting laugh of humorous regret. Stories of fair Circa.s.sians, Balkan countesses, Turkish beauties, Armenian damsels...! Where were they? He had married and settled down here, and remained twenty years in all, and yet nothing had happened. Yes, on the alert for twenty years to detect romantic developments--he had a daughter sixteen years old--and until that ship came in, not a chance! So he described it to his friends at Costi's and at the Austrian Consulate, an immense villa in a charming garden farther along in the Rue Parallel.

For somehow the arrival of that ship was a significant event in more than the accepted sense. It was reserved for Mr. Marsh to perceive the full romantic aspect of the adventure. For others it was a nine-day wonder, an official nuisance or blessing, as suited the official temperament to regard it. To Mr. Spokesly it was an exciting but secondary factor leading up to the greater adventure of departure. It was over-shadowed by the more perplexing problem of explaining himself in a masterless vessel.

But Mr. Marsh, after twenty years, during which he had failed to detect anything resembling romance in his life, when he was called out of his bed at dawn that morning to go off as interpreter, saw the matter in a very different light. Indeed he saw it in the light of romance. His first comment when he found time to review his experiences was: "By Jove, you can't beat that type! We shall always rule, always!" and his bosom swelled at the thought of England. But it was his discovery of Captain Rannie which remained with him as the great scene in the play.

He could not get it out of his mind. He told everybody about it. He revealed a doubt whether other people fully appreciated the extraordinary experience which had been his when he went down that dark curving stairway, "not having the faintest notion, you know, whether I wouldn't get knocked on the head or perhaps blown to bits," and found the door resisting his efforts. An active intelligent resistance! he declared, precisely as though the man were trying to keep him out. And as time pa.s.sed and the story developed in his own mind by the simple process of continually repeating and brooding upon it, as an actor's part becomes clearer to him by rendition, Mr. Marsh developed the theory that when he first went down those stairs and tried to get in, the resistance was in truth intelligent and alive.

He was explaining this new and intriguing "theory," as he called it, on the following evening when Mr. Spokesly accompanied by the husband of Esther, who was "in the Public Debt," entered the great room on the second floor of the Consulate, a magnificent chamber whose windows opened upon balconies and revealed, above the opposite roofs, rectangles of luminous twilight. Some half-dozen gentlemen were seated on chairs in the dusk about one of the balconies. As the newcomers arrived by a side door a servant came in through the enormous curtains at the far end bearing a couple of many-branched candlesticks and advanced towards a table, thus revealing in some degree the elaborate design and shabby neglect of the place. Huge divans in scarlet satin were ripped and battered, the gilding of the sconces was tarnished and blackened, and the parquetry flooring, of intricate design, was warped and loose under the advancing foot. And above their heads, like shadowy wraiths, hung immense candelabra whose l.u.s.tres glittered mysteriously in the candlelight under their coverings of dusty muslin.

Mr. Marsh was leaning his elbows on the balcony railing and facing his audience as he explained his conviction that the captain had intended to keep him out.

"I a.s.sure you," he was saying, and apparently he was directing his remarks at someone who now heard the tale for the first time; "I a.s.sure you, when I pushed the door and saw the man's shoulder, it moved. I mean it actually quivered, apart from my movement of the door. It gave me a very peculiar sensation, because when I spoke, there was no answer. Only a quiver. And another thing. When I finally did shove the door open and so shoved the captain over, the noise was not the noise of a dead inert body, if you understand me. Not at all. It sounded as though he had broken his fall somewhat! I can a.s.sure you----"

Mr. Marsh had enjoyed an excellent education in England. He had the average Englishman's faculty of expressing himself in excellent commonplaces so that every other Englishman knew exactly what he meant.

But his hearers on this occasion were not all Englishmen, and suddenly out of the dusk of the corner came a voice speaking English but not of England at all. Mr. Spokesly, standing a short distance off, was startled at the full-throated brazen clang of it booming through the obscurity of the vast chamber. It was a voice eloquent of youth and impudent virile good-humour, a voice with a strange harsh under-tw.a.n.g which the speaker's ancestors had brought out of central Asia, where they had bawled barbaric war-songs across the frozen s.p.a.ces.

"Broke his what? I don't understand what you mean," said the voice, and a fair-haired young man in a gray uniform, a short, thick golden moustache on his lip, came up suddenly out of the gloom into the radiance of the candles and began to stride to and fro. The interruption was trivial, yet it gave the key to the young man's character, courageous, cultured, precise, and impatient of inferior minds.

"His fall," explained Mr. Marsh politely. "The point is, I believe he was alive almost up to the moment, you know, of our entry. He even moved slightly as I stepped in--a sort of last gasp. I even heard something of that nature. A sigh. Good evening, gentlemen."

The last words were addressed to Mr. Spokesly and his friend in the Public Debt, who crossed the path of the young man striding up and down and were introduced to the company.

"You can corroborate what I say," said Mr. Marsh. "You know I mentioned it at the time--a sort of sigh?"

"What is a sigh, or a moment, for that matter, more or less?" demanded the young man striding up and down. "To me there is something much more important in his motive. Why did this captain of yours end himself? This is a question important to science. I am a student of Lombroso and Molle and the Englishman Ellis. Was this man epileptic? Did he have delusions of grandeur?"

"This gentleman," said Mr. Marsh, "was the officer on deck at the time,"

and he looked at Mr. Spokesly anxiously, as though waiting fresh details of the affair.

"Yes, he had delusions," said Mr. Spokesly, clearing his throat.

"Thought everybody was against him. He took drugs too. My own idea is he took the wrong stuff or too much of it, in his excitement. He was down there in his room when we crashed. And he had another--delusion I suppose you could call it. He didn't like women."

"Didn't like.... Well, who does?" challenged the vigorous metallic voice with a carefully modified yet resonant laugh. One or two laughs, equally modified, floated from obscure corners where cigar-ends glowed, and the animated figure paused in its rapid movement. "I mean, no man likes women as they are unless he is a true sensualist. What we aspire to is the ideal they represent. Your captain must have been a sensualist."

"Because his last breath was a sigh, you mean?" said Mr. Marsh. "I heard it you know. A long-drawn gasp."

"Precisely. The sigh of a sensualist leaving the world of the senses."

Mr. Spokesly stared at Mr. Marsh incredulously.

"I don't think you are 'right,'" he remarked, lighting a fresh cigarette. "The captain was not that sort of man. He was timid, I admit.

He was scared of losing his life."

"Who isn't?" demanded the young man and was beginning another resonant laugh when Mr. Spokesly broke in.

"A good many people," he said sharply, "under the right conditions.

n.o.body _wants_ to get killed, we know. But that does not mean they wouldn't take a risk."

"Well, didn't your captain take the risk?" said Mr. Marsh eagerly. "That was just what...."

"He did but he always wore one of these inflating things," said Mr.

Spokesly quietly. "Vests you blow up when you want them. We had a collision, as you know, and he had it on then. And when he heard us crash I've no doubt he began to inflate it again."

"Then there is no use supposing he committed suicide," said a voice.

"That would be absurd."

"Not altogether," replied Mr. Spokesly. "I don't know whether you gentlemen will think I am a bit mad for saying it, but after knowing him, it's quite possible he took something to kill himself and then tried to save himself from being drowned. There's a lot of difference between being dragged under in a sinking ship, and gradually getting sleepy and stiff in comfort, and don't you forget it. Humph!"

There was a silence for a moment when he ceased speaking, as though he had propounded some new and incontrovertible doctrine of philosophy. The young man who was walking up and down, almost vanishing in the gloom down near the great smoke-coloured velvet curtains, halted and looked interrogatively at Mr. Spokesly.

"But you have not explained why he should kill himself at all," he said.

"A man as you say scared of losing his life."

"Well," said Mr. Spokesly slowly. "He may have seen himself.... I mean he may have realized he had lost his life already, as you might say."

"How, how?" demanded the young man, very much interested. "What do you mean by already?"

"You might call it that," muttered Mr. Spokesly, "with his ideas about women. Couldn't bear to talk about them. And he didn't like men much better. So I say he'd lost his life already. Nothing to live for, if a man hates women. And he did. That's one thing I am sure about."

"You are a psychologist," said the young man, very much amused. "You believe in the inspiration of love."

"Naturally," said Mr. Spokesly. "A man believes in what he understands."

The young man nodded and turned away with the slight smile of one who realizes he is dealing with a person of limited intelligence.