Command Part 37

"You mean we believe in what we have cognition of," he amended in a harsh tone. "No doubt you are right. But your captain may have had beliefs and fidelities beyond your cognition. Perhaps he saw, suddenly, as in a flash, you understand, the ultimate futility of existence. He might. Englishmen don't as a rule. But if he had lived in the East a long while, he might."

"But surely you don't advance that as a tenable hypothesis," exclaimed Mr. Marsh. This man, who had contrived to retain the illusions and metaphysics of the comfortably fixed cla.s.ses of England amid the magnificent scenery and human squalor of Ottoman life, was frankly appalled by the young man's ferocious gaiety while he advanced what he called his theory of philosophic nihilism. That was the disconcerting feature of the affair. This Herr Leutnant Lietherthal actually spoke with pleasure of a time when humanity should have ceased to exist! Mr.

Marsh would almost have preferred a technical enemy to desire the extinction of Englishmen. It was more logical, and he said as much as they adjourned to a smaller room to supper.

"Oh, don't I?" exclaimed the Herr Leutnant, holding up his gla.s.s of k.u.mmel. That was his way of being revenged upon the country where he had lived many happy years. At Oxford, whither the munificence of Rhodes brought him, his sensuous mind had delighted in the apparently opposed but really identical studies of philosophy and philology. Following the example of his tutor at Leipzig, he had often neglected cla.s.srooms in his studies in English, and gone into the slums of great towns and on the dock-sides of London and Liverpool for idioms. And he got them. "Oh, don't I?" he exclaimed, laughing, and added: "I go the whole hog, my friend." And only that subtle under-tw.a.n.g, that strong humming of the vocal chords in his vowels remained to detect him. He was addicted to saying that he had discovered the secret of the English power, which was, he announced, their mongrel origin. "A nation of mongrels who think of nothing but thoroughbred horses and dogs," he had described them to Evanthia, who could not possibly gauge the accuracy of the sentence.

Just now, as he set down his gla.s.s, he added that he went "the whole hog, my friend, as your graceful English expresses it." And then, in reply to Mr. Marsh's shocked comment, he said:

"Why? It would be of no advantage to desire the extinction of any white race. This affair is only a family squabble. But it is a symptom. You may be watching now the first convulsions of the disease by which Europe will die. Europe is dying. The war, the war is only a superficial disturbance. The trouble is deeper than the mud of Flanders, my friend.

Europe is dying because her inspiration, her ideals, are gone. That is what I mean when I say Europe will die. The old fidelities are departing. And when they are all dead, and Europe is a vast cesspool of republicans engaged in mutual extermination, what will happen then, do you think?"

"Why do you talk that mad stuff here?" grunted one of the guests, a quiet middle-aged person with a monocle. He spoke in German, and Lietherthal answered quickly:

"What difference, Oscar? They don't believe me."

"What will happen, I ask you?" he continued in a vibrating tone. "When we have destroyed ourselves, and the survivors of our civilization are creeping feebly about the country, going back little by little to the agricultural age, the yellow men from Asia and the blacks from Africa will come pouring into Europe. Millions of them. They will infest the skeletons of our civilizations like swarms of black and yellow maggots in the sepulchres of kings. And in the end humanity will cease to exist.

Civilization will be dead but there will be n.o.body to bury her," he concluded, smiling. "Europe will be full of the odours of her dissolution."

"I cannot believe," said Mr. Marsh with energy, "that any one would seriously entertain such wild ideas. They imply the negation of all the things we hold dear. I should commit suicide at once if I thought for a single moment such an outcome was possible."

"Perhaps your captain had such a moment," suggested the young man, busily eating fish. "Perhaps he saw, as I said, the futility of existence."

"And you really believe there is no hope?"

"Hope!" echoed Lietherthal with a brazen-throated laugh. "Hear the Englishman crying for his hope! By what right or rule of logic can we demand an inexhaustible supply of hope, especially packed in hundredweight crates for export to the British Colonies? Hope! The finest brand on the market! Will not spoil in the tropics! Stow away from boilers! Use no hooks! That's all an Englishman thinks of if you ask him to consider a scientific question. Doctor, is there any hope?

Hope for himself, not for anybody else."

There was a murmur of laughter at this, a murmur in which even Mr. Marsh joined, for he "could see a joke" as he often admitted. And as the meal progressed and the excellent red wine pa.s.sed, the young man revealed a nimble mind, like quicksilver rather than firm polished metal, which ran easily over the whole surface of life and entertained them with the aptness and scandalous candour of its expression. To most of them, men like Esther's husband, Mr. Jokanian, who had absorbed European ideas through books, so that they had fermented within him in a black froth of pessimism and socialistic bubbles, he was a blond angel from heaven. "A man of remarkable ideas," he observed to Mr. Spokesly, who nodded.

"Remarkable is right," he muttered. He found himself withdrawing instinctively from the highly charged intellectual atmosphere of this community. As he ate his supper and drank the wine, he allowed his mind to return to his own more immediate affairs. It might very well be that civilization and even humanity would die out, but the urgency of the problem was not apparent to a man about to go out on a hazardous adventure with the woman he loved. Only that day he had worked with Mr.

Ca.s.sar, the engineer, who had been making a silencer for the motor. Not that Mr. Spokesly was going to depend upon that. He had a mast and a sail, for he knew the wind was off sh.o.r.e and easterly during the night, and he could save his engine for the time when they had made the outer arm of the Gulf. Mr. Ca.s.sar agreed because he thought they might be short of gasolene in spite of the carefully stored supply. For Mr.

Ca.s.sar had decided to go with his commander. It had been borne in upon Mr. Ca.s.sar that the family in Cospicua, for whom he was industriously providing, might perish of starvation while he grew rich beyond the dreams of avarice, if he could not send them any money--as he obviously could not so long as he remained where he was. Mr. Ca.s.sar was not at all clear as to the causes and extent of the war. All he knew was that he now earned more money, and he naturally hoped it would go on as long as possible. But he also knew enough of war to realize the limits set upon enterprise, just as at sea one had to submit to the ways of the elements. And he had inherited a placid contempt for everything Ottoman, which minimized in his mind the difficulties of departure. And it may have been also a sudden desire to see his wife in Cospicua. She had written him, in a mixture of Maltese and Italian, with many corrections and blots, which had caused the literary-minded censor in Saloniki much trouble, thinking they concealed a cipher; and she had implored him to come back to Valletta and get work in the dockyard. Then they could have a house in Senglea and the children could go to a better school. This was doubtless the underlying thought in Mr. Ca.s.sar's mind when he decided to go along with Mr. Spokesly. And Mr. Spokesly, before going over to the office of the Public Debt, to find Mr. Jokanian, had mentioned that he would be going back rather late to Bairakli.

He sat now, the wine stimulating his mind to unwonted activity, listening to the clever conversation of the blond young man. Mr.

Spokesly was quite prepared to admire him. It was, he reflected, very wonderful how these chaps learned languages. He wished he could speak these lingos. Here they were, German, Austrian, Armenian, Jew, all speaking English. After all, there lay the triumph. As Mr. Marsh said, you couldn't beat that type. "We" went everywhere and all men adopted "our" language and "our" ideas. He heard the Herr Leutnant's tones as he told Mr. Marsh that he himself admired the English. He had lived among them for years. At one time was engaged to marry an _Englanderinn_. And his conclusion was that they had nothing to fear from any other nation.

Their true enemies were within. The hitherto impregnable solidarity of the race was disintegrating. Mr. Spokesly was not clear what this signified. He knew it sounded like the stuff these clever foreigners were always thinking up. When all was said and done, they were all out to do the best they could for themselves. There was Marsh, living as calm as you please in Ottoman territory and making a very decent income in various ways. And there was a young fellow over there, with rich auburn hair flung back from a fine reddish forehead, who had been pointed out to him as the son of a rich old boy who had been there all his life as a Turkey merchant, with great estates and a grand house at Boudja where they were to hold a magnificent garden party to welcome the old General on his arrival from a tour of inspection in Syria. Mr.

Spokesly had heard, too, of the way money was made just now, and he smiled at the simplicity of it. There was the material in the cargo of the _Kalkis_, hardware and flour and gasolene. A pretty rake-off some of these intellectual Europeans had made out of that in what they called transportation charges. And there was the Ottoman Public Debt they had taken up, paying for it in paper and getting the interest in gold. They were doing the best they could under the circ.u.mstances. He saw their point of view well enough. He himself had another problem. He had to get out of it. Mr. Spokesly, as he walked about that shining Levantine city, as he pa.s.sed down those narrow tortuous streets into bazaars reeking with the strange odours of Asiatic life, as he watched the slow oblivious life of the poor, and the sullen furtiveness of the Greek storekeepers and shabby French bourgeoisie waiting in line at the custom house for a chance to buy their morsels of food, saw with penetrating clarity how impossible it would be for him to remain, even if he did get a permanent harbour-master's job. No! He finished his gla.s.s of wine and looked round for the decanter. He saw that these people here, for all their intellectual superiority, their fluent social accomplishments, their familiarity with philosophical compromises, were simply evading the facts. They were variants of Mr. Jokanian, who was also reaching regularly for the decanter, and who was attempting to forget a national failure in high-sounding poppyc.o.c.k about the autocracy of the proletariat. Mr. Marsh was proud of being an Englishman, in a well-bred way, for he was always insisting "you could not beat that type"; but what was his idea of an Englishman?

A person who, strictly speaking, no longer existed. Mr. Marsh was fortunate in having his ideals and illusions preserved in the dry air of the Levant as in a hermetically sealed chamber. The type he spoke of was being very handsomely beaten in all directions and was being rescued from utter annihilation by a very different type--the mechanical engineer, who was no doubt preparing the world for a fresh advance upon its ultimate destruction. Mr. Spokesly, in a rich glow of exaltation, saw these vast and vague ideas parade in his mind as he listened abstractedly to the conversation. But as the wine pa.s.sed, that cosmic quality pa.s.sed, too, and he began to hear other things besides theories of evolution. He heard someone remark that they had a very fine piano, a Bechstein grand. Some consul had brought it from Vienna for his musical daughter. But it was impossible to take it with them when he was transferred to Teheran. Another voice desired to know what was done with the musical daughter, and amid laughter they began to push their chairs back, lighting cigarettes and lifting liqueurs to carry them to another room.

Looking down into a courtyard which contained, amid much rank vegetation, an empty marble basin surmounted by a one-legged Diana with a broken bow, and a motor car with only three wheels and no engine, Mr.

Spokesly leaned out to watch the moon setting over the dark ma.s.ses of the neighbouring roofs. Behind him the Bechstein grand was surrounded by some half-dozen gentlemen explaining their preferences, laughing, whistling a few notes, and breaking into polite cries of wonder.

Suddenly there was a silence, and Mr. Marsh, seated at the instrument and running his hands over the keys in a highly versatile fashion, began "John Peel" in a high thin tenor that sounded as though it came from behind the neighbouring mountain. Thin yet sweet, so that the peculiar sentiment of the song, dedicated "to that type" which Mr. Marsh so much admired, reached Mr. Spokesly as he leaned out and noted the sharp, slender black shapes of the cypresses silhouetted against the dark blue vault of the sky with its incredibly brilliant stars. He smiled and reflected that the moon would be gone in a couple of hours, a red globe over Cordelio. In a few nights it would set before night-fall. He drank his liqueur. A moonless night and he would be away from all this. He wished he were back at Bairakli now. He grudged every moment away from her. He had caught her making little preparations of her own, and when he had chaffed her she had looked at him in an enigmatic way with her bright amber eyes, her beautiful lips closed, and gently inhaling through her nostrils. What an amazing creature she was! He would sit and watch her in the house, entranced, oblivious of time or destiny. He wished Mrs. Dainopoulos could know of his happiness. He never suspected that when Mrs. Dainopoulos at length heard of this episode, it was expressed in a single shrug of the shoulders and a faint vanishing smile. The song ended with a tinkle:

"_Oh, I ken John Peel, from my bed where I lay, As he pa.s.sed with his hounds in the morning!_"

and there was a murmur of applause. Mr. Spokesly, looking out into the darkness, clapped and lit another cigarette. He was startled by a great crash of chords. The young man, a cigar in his teeth, his head enveloped in a blue cloud of smoke, was seated at the piano. Mr. Spokesly turned and watched him. Mr. Marsh came over to the window, smiling.

"D'you do anything?" he asked. "We should be delighted, you know, if you would. It relieves the tension, don't you think?"

"Not in my line, I'm afraid," said Mr. Spokesly. "I never had any accomplishments."

He stood listening to the full, rounded, clangorous voice, toned down to Heine's beautiful words:

"_Die Luft ist kuhl und dunkelt, Und ruhig fliesst der Rhein, Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt Im Abend Sonnenschein._"

"Wonderful voice," whispered Mr. Marsh. "Studied at Leipzig. Rather a talented chap, don't you think? By the way, I heard to-night they intend making an inspection of the outer harbour while they are here. Improving the defences. They don't want any more ships to come in the way you did.

Of course it was luck as well as pluck. Probably lay fresh mines."

"Is that a fact?" asked Mr. Spokesly. As in a dream he heard the applause, himself clapping mechanically and then the booming of ba.s.s chords. And a voice like a silver trumpet, triumphant and vibrating, blared out the deathless call of the lover to his beloved:

"_Isolde! Geliebte! Bist du mein?

Hab ich dich wieder?_"

"Well it's pretty reliable. A friend of mine who is in the timber trade--got a saw mill up at Menenen and uses horses--has been given a contract to bring down a lot of stones to the harbour. Fill all those lighters, you know. That'll mean quite a lot of work for you, eh?"

Mr. Spokesly turned resolutely to the window and looked out over the dark roofs at the l.u.s.trous and spangled dome of the sky. He would have to find Ca.s.sar and give him some instructions at once. It would be impossible to get away if they waited for a swarm of workmen and officials to come down and be for ever sailing up and down the Gulf. He ought to have thought of such a contingency. He must find Ca.s.sar. And then he must get back to Evanthia and tell her they must go at once.

To-morrow night. He heard the heavy stamp of feet that greeted the end of the song and joined in without thinking. As he walked across to the door Mr. Marsh followed him, and Mr. Jokanian, his dark yearning eyes brilliant with the wine he had drunk, came over making gestures of protestation as another voice rose from behind the grand piano:

"_Enfant, si j'etais Roi, je donnerais l'empire, Et mon char, et mon sceptre, et mes peuples a genoux, Et mon couronne d'or, et mes bains de porphyre._"

"I am coming back," said Mr. Spokesly, "but I must see if my boat is ready."

"You don't need any boat," said Mr. Jokanian. "We are going back in my carriage. Mr. Lietherthal goes with us. I have invited him."

"_Pour un regard de vous!_" sang the voice, and trembled into a pa.s.sionate intricacy of arpeggios.

"I shall not be long," he repeated. "I must tell my man I sha'n't need it, in that case."

He felt he must get out of there at once, if only for a moment. This combination of wine and music was becoming too much for him. As he came out into the courtyard he heard Victor Hugo's superb challenge ring out:

"_Enfant, si j'etais Dieu, je donnerais le Ciel!_"

He walked quickly along in the profound shadow of the Rue Parallel until he reached the great doors of the Pa.s.sage Kraemer. Here he might have seen, had he been watchful, in a corner by the disused elevator of the hotel, the young Jew talking to a girl in cap and ap.r.o.n. The youth saw him and clutched his companion's arm.

"Madama's husband," he whispered. "The Englishman."

"Well," said the girl, bending her dark brows upon the figure hurrying out upon the quay, "I think your Madama is a fool."

"S-sh!" whimpered the young man. "She is the most glorious creature in the world."

"And a fool," repeated the girl. "That other upstairs in Suite Fourteen will desert her in a month. I know his style. He only left the last one in Kara-hissar, so his servant told us. I know if _I_ had a chance of marrying an Englishman.... Yes! She has got you anyhow," she added, laughing. "You are like a cony in love with a snake."

He put up his hand in warning, as though he feared by some occult power Madama would hear these rash and sacrilegious words. He took out a tiny piece of paper and looked at it.

"I must go," he said. "You are certain it is this Frank, who has come?"

he urged anxiously.

"Yes," she said, smiling contemptuously. "When I pa.s.sed him in the corridor, he put his arm round me and said he would love me for ever.