Command Part 9

But Mr. Dainopoulos had been living on a somewhat higher scale in London and he had not noticed the dirt so much. Moreover, he could always get the food he wanted in London.

"Well, where?" insisted Alice, humouring him.

"There's plenty places," he said soberly, rather faint as he compared their present surroundings with that dream-villa by the blue sea. "Too soon yet to be sure we get there. I got a lot of business to finish up first. And we're all right here for a while. You're not lonesome, darling?"

"Oh, no! You saw Evanthia here to-night?"

"Yes, I saw her, but she didn't tell me anything."

"He's gone away, with the consuls."

Mr. Dainopoulos gave a low whistle.

"I never thought about that. What'll she do now? That's bad for her, though."

"She wants to follow him but I don't think she can. I believe she heard he'll go to Constantinople. She said she'd do anything to get there."

"Well, if she wants to go to Constantinople, she might be able to," he said, pondering. "I heard to-day a ship might be going down to the Islands. There's always a chance. I'll see. But if she's got any sense she'll go back to her mother. That feller Lietherthal is good company but he'll go back to Munich by-and-by."

"She doesn't love him, I am almost sure."

"Evanthia, she don't love anybody except herself. I told you that."

"She loves me," said Alice.

"Well, p'raps she does, but you know what I mean."

"That gentleman this evening, Mr. Spokesly, he was interested in her."

"He's got a young lady in London," said Mr. Dainopoulos.

"Has he?" she murmured absently. "Do you think he'll come to-morrow night?"

"Yes, I think so. I bet you're goin' to have Evanthia in, too."

"Well, perhaps he'll fall in love with her," she whispered delightedly.

"What, and him with a young lady in London!"

"I don't think he's very fond of his young lady in London."

"Well, how do you know that? Women...."

"Never mind. It's easy to tell if a man is in love," she answered, watching him. He held her tightly for a moment.

"Not so easy to tell about a woman," he said into her hair. "Is it, my little wife, my little wife?"

"Why, don't you know yet?" she bantered, giving him that secret, fragrant, ambiguous smile.

"My little wife!" he repeated in a tense whisper. And as he said it, he felt in his heart he would never know.

CHAPTER VII

It was evening and the _Tanganyika_, a tall unwieldy bulk, for she had only a few hundred tons in her, lay at anchor waiting for her commander, who was ash.o.r.e getting the ship's papers. She was about to sail for Alexandria, carrying back, through an area infested with enemy submersibles, some of the cargo already discharged and reloaded in the southern port. This apparently roundabout method of achieving results had in it neither malice nor inefficiency. Those who have had anything to do with military matters will understand the state of affairs, and the seemingly insane evolutions of units proceeding blindly upon orders from omnipotent commanders. The latter had ever before them the shifting conditions of a dozen theatres of war, and to them it was nothing that a crate of spark-plugs, for example, sorely needed in Persia, should be carried to and fro over the waters of the aegean, or that locomotives captured from an Austrian transport and suitable for the Macedonian railroads should be rusting in the open air in Egypt. These men, scoured clean and pink as though with sand and boiling water every morning, in their shining harness and great gold-peaked hats, moved swiftly in high-powered motor cars from one consultation to another, the rows of medal ribbons glowing on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s like iridescent plumage. They lived in a world apart. For them it was inevitable that a whole fleet of ships should be no more than a microscopic point in some great curve named Supply. Behind them was a formidable element called Politics, a power which appeared to them to come out of Bedlam and which would suddenly change its course and make the labour of months of no avail.

Their eyes were steadily fixed upon certain military dispositions, and they sent forth, from their lofty stations, standing orders which enclosed each subordinate commander in an isolated compartment, beyond which he could not possibly wander, but within which he could exercise a practically G.o.d-like power. This system, admirable because it relieved each executive from any concern with the final upshot of the struggle, ultimately reached the _Tanganyika_. Her captain, receiving his instructions from the Naval Transport office, found himself in sole charge of life and property upon her, while for subsequent sailing orders he was referred to the commanding officer of a sloop now moving slowly towards the boom. Captain Meredith in no wise objected to this.

What struck him with ironical emphasis was the ineffectiveness of military traditions when applied to a ship with a civilian crew. He might issue orders, but who was to foreshadow the effect on the minds of the Orientals who steered and stoked and oiled below? What might he expect in a sudden disaster from those yellow enigmas padding to and fro or sitting on their hams drinking rice-water and staring at the sh.o.r.es of Macedonia with unfathomable eyes? He had been asked if in his opinion the crew were loyal, and he had wondered how any one could find that out. Loyalty, when you came to place it under a.n.a.lysis, presented a somewhat baffling problem. It was like trying to find out whether men were religious. The a.s.sumption, of course, was that all men had in them, deep down, something of ultimate probity. But of what use was that in such a sudden emergency as confronted one at sea these days? Captain Meredith refrained from dwelling too long upon probabilities as he returned to the _Tanganyika_. He hoped he would get through all right again. He had heard hints of a cargo for Basra, in the Persian Gulf; and until they could get him a white crowd he would rather not take any more risks in the aegean. The longer the war went on the less important seemed abstractions like loyalty or patriotism, and the more shiningly important the need for unimaginative and quick-witted efficiency. There lay the trouble. The naval or military commander had behind him the prestige and power of service discipline and he was supported in his ruthless judgments by the rank and file. The naval officer spoke his orders in a quiet, refined voice, and ma.s.sive muscular bluejackets, drilled for years, sprang smartly to carry them out. Here, Captain Meredith reflected, it was not quite like that. Seamen in merchant ships were largely individualists. Had they, for example, been forced by law to go to sea immediately after being sunk, they would almost inevitably have rebelled and sulked ash.o.r.e. Being free agents, they were filled with fury, and mobbed shipowners to send them out again. This was the good side. The bad side was the difficulty in getting them to obey orders. Moreover, as was made plain during his recent interview with the officers in the Transport Department, his own cla.s.s, the commanders, had something to learn about doing as they were bid. They had shown him a Weekly Order, just in from Malta, demonstrating the urgent necessity of all captains carrying out their instructions. The huge _Afganistan_, triple screws and with four thousand souls on board, had been sunk and many lost, while her escort was awaiting her two hundred miles to the south. It was pointed out to Captain Meredith that the _Afganistan_ was lost simply because her commander had disobeyed explicit orders given at Port Said. Well! It was not pleasant, but had to be borne. This was, he supposed, being faithful unto death. He climbed on board, waved good-bye to the lieutenant in the launch, and ordered the anchor up.

Mr. Spokesly was waiting at the gangway for that very purpose and went forward at once. Captain Meredith, on reaching his room, rang the bell.

The second steward appeared at the door, a long lubberly lout with yellow hair plastered athwart a dolichocephalous cranium and afflicted with extraordinarily unlovely features.

"Where is the chief steward?" the captain demanded.

"In 'is room, sir. I was to sye, sir, as 'e ain't feelin' very well this afternoon, sir, if you'll excuse 'im."

"Drunk, I suppose," said the commander quietly.

"Ow, it's not for me to sye, sir," the creature whinnied, moving enormous feet encased in service shoes pilfered from cargo. "Was it tea you was wantin', sir?"

"Bring it," said Captain Meredith, regarding him with extreme disfavour, and the man disappeared.

Not much chance there, thought the captain, as he noted the awkward knuckly hands, with nails bitten to the quick, which arranged the tray before him and made a number of the indescribable motions peculiar to stewards. Hands! How marvellously they indicated character! He was reminded afresh of his own brother-in-law, a surgeon, of whose death in action he had learned during the week. Wonderful hands he had had, long with broad shallow points, indicative of a very fine skill with the knife. Now he was dead; and this creature here would no doubt survive and prosper when it was all over. The captain had been thinking a good deal during the past few days. An old friend of his, a school-master in happier times, had suddenly descended upon him, a bronzed person in khaki with a major's crowns on his shoulder-straps. Had a few days'

leave from the Struma front. He was not elated at his rise in rank, it transpired, for it had simply been a process of rapid elimination. All the senior officers had been killed; and here he was, an old gray badger of an elderly lieutenant promoted to major. There was a lull on the Struma, he said, his tired, refined voice concealing the irony. Very delightful to have a few days' peace on a ship with a friend. Now he was back on the Struma; and perhaps next time Captain Meredith got news there would be another gap in that little staff. He stepped out on the bridge. The anchor was coming up.

Mr. Spokesly was thinking, too, in spite of the immediate distraction of heaving-up. It had been a week of extraordinary experiences for him. As he leaned over the rail and looked down into the waters of the Gulf, and noted the immense jelly-fish, like fabled amethysts, moving gently forward to the faint rhythmic pulsing of their delicate fringes, he began to doubt afresh his ident.i.ty with the rather ba.n.a.l person who had left England a couple of short months before. He found himself here now, outwardly the same, yet within there was a readjustment of forces and values that at times almost scared him. For he had reached a position from which it was impossible to gauge the future. Nothing would ever be the same again. He was frankly astonished at his own spiritual resources. He had not known that he was capable of emotions so far removed from a smug commonplace. Love, as he had conceived it, for example, had been an affair of many oppressive restrictions, an affair of ultimate respectability and middle-aged affection. Oh, dear, no! It appeared to be a different thing entirely. He discovered that once one was thoroughly saturated with it, one stepped out of all those ideas as out of a suit of worn and uncomfortable clothing. Indeed, one had no need of ideas at all. One proceeded through a series of transmigrations.

One arrived at conclusions by a species of intuition. Life ceased to be an irritating infliction and became a grand panorama.

And yet in the present situation what did it all amount to? With its well-known but inexplicable rapidity, rumour had already gone round the ship hinting at a trip to the Persian Gulf. If that were so, Mr.

Spokesly, by all the laws of probability, would never be in Saloniki again. Yet he was quite confident that he would be in Saloniki again. He had no clear notion of what he proposed to do when he reached Alexandria, but he was determined to manage it somehow. He had a feeling that he was matched against fate and that he would win. He did not yet comprehend the full significance of what he called fate. He was unaware that it is just when the G.o.ds appear to be striving against us that they need the most careful watching lest they lure us to destroy ourselves.

He was preoccupied with the immediate past; which he did not suspect is the opiate the G.o.ds use when they are preparing our destinies. And while he was sure enough in his private mind that he would get back to Saloniki somehow, the slow movement of the _Tanganyika_ as she came up on her anchor gave the episode an appearance of irrevocable completeness. He was departing. Somewhere among those trees beyond the White Tower, trees that shared with everything else in Saloniki an appearance of shabby and meretricious glamour, like a tarnished and neglected throne, was Evanthia Solaris. And the ship was moving. The anchor was coming up and the ship was going slow ahead. Mr. Spokesly looked down at the water that was gushing through the hawse-pipe and washing away the caked mud from the links and shackles. As far as he could see he was going back to Alexandria, back by devious ways to London, and Evanthia Solaris, with her amber eyes, her high-piled glossy black hair and swift, menacing movements, would be no more than an alluring memory. And as the anchor appeared and the windla.s.s stopped heaving while the men hosed the mud from the flukes, Mr. Spokesly began to realize, with his new-found perception, that what he took to be confidence was only desire. He was imagining himself back there in Saloniki; a man without ties or obligations. He saw an imaginary Spokesly seizing Evanthia and riding off into the night with her, riding into the interior, regardless of French sentries with their stolid faces and extremely long bayonets. As he recapitulated the actual conditions he saw he had only been dreaming of going back there. He had drawn all the money he could and he owed Archy Bates a ten-pound note. Stowed away under his clothes in his cabin he had nearly an oke, which is about three pounds, of a dark brown substance which Mr. Dainopoulos had mentioned was worth eighty pounds in Egypt if it were adroitly transferred to the gentleman who had expressed his willingness to do business with the friends of Mr. Bates. Here lay the beginnings of that desire, it seemed. That eighty pounds might put Mr. Spokesly in a position to go where he liked. It might; but the chances were that Mr.

Spokesly would fail to get away from himself after all. It is not so easy to be an outlaw as it appears, when one has been one of the respectable middle cla.s.ses for so long. The seaman is as carefully indexed as a convict, and has very little more chance in ordinary times of getting away. Mr. Spokesly knew that and had no such notion in his head. What he did meditate was some indirect retirement from the scene, when a pocketful of loose cash would enable him to effect a desirable man[oe]uvre in a dignified manner, and he would have no need to forfeit his own opinion of himself. The temperament of the crook may sometimes be innate, but in most cases it is the result of a long apprenticeship.

Mr. Spokesly wanted money, he wanted a command, he even wanted romance; but he did not want to be wicked. He could no more get away from Haverstock Hill, North West London, than could Mrs. Dainopoulos with all her romantical equipment. Therein lay the essential difference between himself and Mr. Dainopoulos, who also desired respectability, but who had in reserve a native facility for swift and secret chicanery. Mr.

Dainopoulos slipped in and out of the law as easily as a lizard through the slats of a railing. Mr. Spokesly could not do that, he discovered to his own surprise and perhaps regret. Unknown to himself, the austere integrity of distant ancestors and the hard traditions of an ancient calling combined to limit his sphere of action. The reason why many of us remain merely useful and poverty-stricken nonent.i.ties is that we can serve no other purpose in the world. We lack the flare for spectacular exploits; and even the war, which was to cleanse and revitalize the world, has left us very much as we were, the victims of integrity.

When he had seen the anchor made fast and the compressors screwed tight, Mr. Spokesly went aft to get his tea. He was to go on watch at eight.

This was the Captain's idea, he reflected. They were supposed to pick up a new third mate in Alexandria. In the meanwhile the Captain was taking a watch. It was very unsatisfactory, but what was one to do? The Old Man had been very quiet about the sh.o.r.e-going in Saloniki. Hardly left the ship himself. Had that friend of his, a major, living in the spare cabin. Whiskies and sodas going upstairs too, the second steward had mentioned. Too big to notice what his own officers were doing, no doubt.

If he knew what his chief officer was doing! By Jove! Mr. Spokesly was suddenly inflated, as he sat eating his tea, with extraordinary pride.

He had recalled the moment when he had walked into the concert-hall of the White Tower Gardens with Evanthia Solaris. The proudest moment of his life. Every officer in the room had stared. Every woman had glared at the slim _svelte_ form with the white velvet toque set off by a single spray of osprey. As well they might, since they had never seen her before. They had seen the toque, however, in Stein's Oriental Store, and had wondered who had bought it. And as they had moved through the dense throng of little tables surrounded by officers and cocottes, amid a clamour of gla.s.ses and laughter and sc.r.a.ping chairs, with music on the distant stage, Mr. Spokesly experienced a new pleasure. They sat down and ordered beer. Upstairs a number of Russian officers, in their beautiful soft green uniforms, were holding a girl over the edge of a box and enjoying her screams. Someone threw a cream cake at the girl who was singing on the stage and it burst on her bosom, and everyone shrieked with laughter. The girl went into a paroxysm of rage and snarled incomprehensibly at them before flinging out of sight, and they all bawled with merriment. It was rich. Suddenly the Russian officers pushed the girl over the edge of the box and she dangled by her wrists.

The audience howled as she kicked and screamed. The uproar became intolerable. Officers of all nations rose to their feet and bawled with excitement. One of them put a chair on a table and reached up until he could remove the dangling girl's shoe. It was filled with champagne and pa.s.sed round. The girl was drawn up and disappeared into the box. The manager appeared on the stage to implore silence and order. Someone directed a soda-siphon at him and he retired, drenched. Finally a large placard was displayed which informed the audience that "_a cause du tapage le spectacle est fini_," and the curtain descended. They went out into the gardens, Evanthia holding his arm and taking short prinking little steps. Why had she wanted to go to such a place? He was obliged to admit she hardly seemed aware of the existence of the people around her. She sat there sipping her beer, smiling divinely when she caught his eye, yet with an air of invincible abstraction, as though under some enchantment. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled, as he would always be puzzled about women. Even his robust estimate of his own qualification as a male was not sufficient to explain the sudden mysterious change in Evanthia Solaris. Was she afraid, she who gave one the impression of being afraid of nothing? But Mr. Spokesly was not qualified to comprehend a woman's moods. His destiny, his function, precluded it. He never completely grasped the fact that women, being realists, see love as it really is, and are shocked back into a world of ideal emotions where they can experiment without imperilling their sense of daintiness and vestal dedication to a G.o.d. And Evanthia Solaris was experimenting now. Her _liaison_ with the gay and debonair creature who had journeyed out of Saloniki that night with the departing consuls had been an inspiration to her to speculate upon the ultimate possibilities of emotional development. Just now she was quiet, as a spinning top is quiet, her thoughts, her conjectures, merely revolving at high speed. With the quickness of instinct she had admitted this friend of Mrs. Dainopoulos to a charming and delicate comradeship committing her to nothing. That he should love, of course, went without saying. She was debating, however, and revolving in her shrewd and capable brain, how to use him.

And it gave her that air of diffident shyness blended with saucy courage which made him feel, now he was soberly eating his tea on board the _Tanganyika_, outward bound, that she was a sorceress who had thrown an enchantment about him. And he wanted, impossible as he knew it to be, to go back there and resign himself again to the enchantment, closing his eyes, and leaving the _denouement_ to chance. No doubt the novelty of such a course appealed to him, for he came of a race whose history is one long war against enchantments and the poisonous fumes of chance. He went on stolidly eating his tea, substantial British provender, pickled pig's feet, beet-and-onion salad, stewed prunes, damson jam, and tea as harsh as an east wind. He loitered over the second cup, while the second steward pa.s.sed behind him with a napkin, eager for him to finish, for that gentleman intended to gorge, while Archy Bates was indisposed, on pig's feet and pickled walnuts. Mr. Spokesly loitered because he knew, when he was once again in his own cabin, that he would be facing a problem which makes all men, except artists and scoundrels, uneasy. The problem was Ada. He did not want to think about Ada, a girl who was in an una.s.sailable position as far as he was concerned. He wanted her to stay where she was, in beleaguered England, until he was ready to go back, until he had regained command of himself. He rose up suddenly and went along to his cabin. His idea was that Ada should wait for him, wait while he went through this extraordinary experience. His mind even went forward and planned the episode. He would get the money in Alexandria, get out of the ship somehow, return to Saloniki ... and when the war was over he would of course return to England and find Ada waiting for him.

It was an admirable scheme and more frequently carried out than Mr.

Spokesly was aware. Yet he was secretly ashamed. He had also a vague, illogical notion that, after all, he was not contemplating any real infidelity to Ada since he fully intended to return to her. He was very confused in his mind. He was not accustomed to such crises. He took up the little green pamphlets of the London School of Mnemonics. An aphorism caught his eye. _Be sure your chin will find you out._ The idea was expanded in an essay on forcefulness of character. The theory propounded was that we have all of us a minute germ of character force which by exercise and correct training can be developed into a formidable engine for the acquisition of power, position, and wealth.

Another aphorism ran: _Train the muscles of your mind._ Just as the use of dumb-bells brought out rippling rolls of muscle under a satin skin, so the use of the Mnemonic method of Intensive Excogitation rounded out the sinews of the mind and gave a glistening polish to the conversation.

Above all, it augmented one's cerebral vitality. One became a forceful personality and exerted a magnetic influence over women....

Mr. Spokesly's feet hurt him slightly. He went along to the pantry and ordered a bucket of hot water, and proceeded to go the rounds of the ship to see that all ports and doors were screened. His feet hurt him.