Captain Macedoine's Daughter Part 12

"And then, outside, Mrs. Sarafov insisted that I would lose my way.

Pollyni must go with me and show me a short route to a landing-stage where I could get a boat. We stood in the clear darkness of the high, narrow sidewalk, and I could feel the girl move closer to me as she lifted her chin and smiled into my eyes. What? Lyrical? Well, I can tell you that you would have been lyrical, too, doctor. I was thirty-five, you know, and I had never been in close contact with beautiful women before. Just as Artemisia had her own secret lure, a lure founded on her exquisite, derisive humour and her sombre heritage, so this extraordinarily seductive and friendly young person, an entrancing character composed of Eastern mystery and Western frankness, appealed irresistibly to the connoisseur in a man. She was s.e.x, and nothing but s.e.x, yet she maintained without effort the role of being merely a dear friend of Captain Macedoine's daughter.

"'You must come again,' said Mrs. Sarafov, drawing her shawl round her fine shoulders. 'We don't often see people from the other side. In the afternoon, eh? And Miss Macedoine, she'll come over.'

"'Then you don't think there will be any trouble?' I asked. 'Any fighting, I mean.'

"'We never interfere in politics,' she answered, drily. 'So long as you mind your own business and let them fight it out among 'emselves, you're safe enough here, I should say.'

"'What is it all about?' I demanded.

"'That's more than I can tell you,' she answered with disarming candour.

'Taxes mostly, I guess. But you have to pay 'em to somebody.' And then she added cryptically: 'I don't know as we'll be any better off if they was to win.'

"Well, we talked a little longer and then the girl, who had run into the house for a shawl, stepped along beside me with her long, sure-footed stride and we started up the dark street. There were very few lights about now and from time to time she put her hand on my arm as we came to a gap in the sidewalk.

"'And so,' I said in a low tone, 'you are a great friend of Miss Macedoine, I understand.'

"'Oh, yes,' she said. 'I like her very much. She tells me everything.'

"'Everything?' She nodded, leaning forward and looking up at me in a certain demure, elvish fas.h.i.+on.

"'Yes!' she replied, dwelling on the word with tremendous emphasis.

'Everything. About you, when you come to see her in London, you know.

Oh, she like you. She like you very much. When she know you have come, she'll be crazy.'

"'But you know,' I protested, 'you know I'm only a sort of friend.'

"'Oh, yes!' again with the dwelling accent. 'Of course, a friend. And she talk and talk and tell me all about you and say to me: 'No, he'll never come. I'll never see him again. Forget it,' and then she sits and looks at the sea for an hour. And when I say to her: 'Why don't you write?' she say, 'I have,' and is all sad and miserable.'

"'But she didn't tell _me_ this when she wrote.'

"'No?' said the girl with a faintly sarcastic inflection. 'Well, she wouldn't ... I suppose.'

"'Besides which,' I went on, 'she gave me to understand she was living with this Monsieur Kinaitsky, so....'

"'He supports her,' she said, 'she's very lucky.'

"'How?' I asked, astonished at this peculiar sentiment.

"'Because he never goes near her for, oh, since this three months. He's married, you know. You'll pa.s.s his house in the boat, only there's a fog on the Gulf to-night. And he supports four others. Very rich. And so long as she stays round she can do what she likes.'

"'Would you mind telling me, my dear,' I said, 'why this gentleman supports all these ... er ... strangers?' She shrugged her shoulders and took my arm daintily.

"'Because he's rich, I suppose,' she remarked. 'They all do it here. In England--no?' she added in inquiry.

"'Well, not on such a lavish scale,' I admitted. 'Then there would be no harm in my going to see her where she lives?'

"'Oh, sure! She wants you to. I'll go to-morrow, eh? And tell her you will come? What time?'

"'What about the afternoon?'

"'Yes. And now I'll tell you how to get there.'

"'You'd better write it down,' I said, 'when we come to a light.'

"As we approached the road running parallel to the curve of the Gulf the air became heavy and moist. It was October, with a chill in the midnight air. And for another thing, it was as quiet as any country road of an autumn night at home. Our feet padded softly on the matted leaves lying wet on the path when we turned into the main road, and through the gardens of the villas came a faint breath of air laden with salt and the dead odours of the river delta. We seemed to be alone in the world, we two, as we hurried along in the darkness, and the girl pressed more closely to me as though for protection against unseen dangers. And yet, so crystal clear was her soul, that there lay on my mind a delicious fancy that she was deliberately impersonating the woman who had talked to her of me, that she was offering herself as a chaste and temporary subst.i.tute for the being whom, so she a.s.sumed, we both loved.

"And I," said Mr. Spenlove, after some business with a reluctant match, "was not prepared, just then, to deny it. It would be absurd and misleading to speak of a community of interest as love, yet we are driven to discover some reason for what we call love apart from the appeal of s.e.x. Otherwise a pretty promiscuous kettle of fis.h.!.+ Where does it begin and out of what does it grow? I'm not asking because I imagine I shall get any answer. I'm inclined to believe the origin of love is as obscure as that of life itself. I put the thought into words, because at that moment, with that girl beside me, with the whole mundane contraption of existence obliterated by a damp, foggy darkness, with the moisture dripping hurriedly from invisible trees, and the immediate future rendered ominous by Captain Macedoine's remarks, I felt a conviction that I was closer to the solution of the problem than I had ever been before. Or since, for that matter. Closer, I say. I was aware of it without being actually able to take hold of it. Nor did I try to take hold of it. I was still in that condition of mucilaginous uncertainty toward my emotions in which most of us English seem to pa.s.s our days. Foreigners are led to imagine we really take no interest in the subject of love, for example, we are so scared of any approach to the flames of desire. We compromise by floating down some economic current into the broad river of matrimony. We have a genius for emotional relinquishment. We--you--are born compromisers. We are so sure that we shall never know the supreme raptures of pa.s.sion that most of us never do know them. And in any case we are so rattled by the mere proximity of love that we never seem to get any coherent conception of its nature. And I was not much of an exception. I have no supreme secret to impart to you. As I have said, I am _par excellence_ a super in the play. For a few memorable moments I was entrusted with the part of a princ.i.p.al. It was not my fault, after all, that nothing came of it.

I sometimes wonder what _would_ have come of it, had not her sinister destiny intervened....

"And then suddenly our feet struck timber that rang hollow and I made out a slender jetty running into the fog. The girl moved ahead, drawing me after her as she scanned the water with her other hand shading her eyes. For a moment she stood listening and then she uttered a melodious contralto shout for someone named '_Makri!_' I can recall, as I repeat the word, the name of that obscure and unknown boatman, the very timbre of her voice, the poise of her form, and the firm flexure of her fingers on mine. And for that moment, as we stood waiting and the boat came slowly and silently toward us with the standing figure of the oarsman lost in the higher fog, I had an extraordinary impression, clear and diminutive as a vignette, that I loved her and that she, in some mysterious fas.h.i.+on, could love me without jeopardizing her own destiny.

A folly, of course; but I insist it gave me an inkling, that brief illumination, of the actual nature of love."

At this momentous declaration Mr. Spenlove suddenly relapsed into a pause that became a silence, as though he were still under the influence of that illumination of which he spoke, and were pondering it to the extent of forgetting his audience altogether. And it was a suspicion of this amiable idiosyncrasy which caused the surgeon to make a remark. Mr. Spenlove gave a grunt of a.s.sent.

"Yes," he said. "You are right. But this is not a supreme secret. I can only offer you the suggestion that what you call a love affair is really only a sequence of innumerable small pa.s.sions. Yes, for a moment, you know, I saw them plainly enough--a procession of tiny, perfect things, moments, gestures, glances, and silences each complete and utterly beautiful in itself, preoccupied with its own perfection. Scientific?

Not at all. Intuition and nothing else. One did not indulge in science with that magical girl holding one's hand. Science is only a sort of decorous guesswork at the best, guesswork corroborated by facts. In the presence of a woman like that, you know! At this distance of time, my friends, I can tell you that this girl, the chance acquaintance of a chance evening, imposed her personality upon me as the very genius of the tender pa.s.sion. Yet I had but that one rhythmical moment by which to judge--and the boat, a long and elegantly carved affair of cedar wood decorated with bra.s.s bulbs, slid softly alongside, a tiny lantern glowing between the thwarts; like some perilous bark of destiny, and she a charming, enigmatic spirit watching with gracious care my departure for an alluring yet unknown sh.o.r.e.

"For that is what it was. I stepped into that long, narrow affair, with its tall, gondola-like prow and absurd bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s, and I left my youth behind on the hollow-sounding boards of that jetty. No, there is nothing to laugh at in a man of thirty-five leaving his youth behind. There are men who have seen their own daughters married, and retain for themselves the hearts of adventurous boys. From the formidable ramparts of half a century they can leap down and frolic with the young fellows who for the first time are in love, or seeing the world, or holding down a job, or reading Balzac. I cannot compete with such men. Youth fills me with awe.

It is something I believe I had once, but I am not sure. I watch them nowadays, with their unerring cruelty of instinct, their clear egotism, their uncanny intuition and sophistication, and I wonder if I were ever like that, a sort of callow and clever young G.o.d! I wonder, too, whether a good deal of the modern misery and unhappiness isn't simply due to women being at a loss, as it were, to know just what the new and improved breed of young men want. All this talk of women themselves becoming modern is so much flub-dub. Look at Mrs. Evans. She was, and is, coeval with the Jura.s.sic Period. And women are continually trying to get back there. You may ask me how I know this, and I can only tell you that I have an emotional conviction--the strongest conviction in the world, born of the tremendous experience which was coming upon me.

"And the first thing which, you might say, certified my new status as a grown-up human being, was my promise to go and see Captain Macedoine's daughter. I mean I made that promise without a shadow of reservation. In youth we hedge, we balk, we bilk, over and over again. Fidelity is unattractive to us. We cannot see that to keep a promise made to a woman is a species of spiritual strength. It may be a foolish promise made to a worthless woman, but that is of no importance. In youth we go on breaking away, breaking away, for one reason or another, until we have not even faith in ourselves, until we lose sight of the essential nature of true fidelity, which is a blind disregard of our own immediate well being. And I was astonished, as I sat in that boat and floated away into the gray void of the fog, with the girl, the sh.o.r.e, the sky, all gone, that she had infected me with her romantic view of life. I had always preserved a sort of semi-religious notion that love, for me personally you know, was bound to be an affair of highly respectable and virtuous character. I don't know why, I'm sure, but I had that illusion. But I discovered in that fog-bound boat that I knew very little about myself after all, that the future was absolutely unknown to me beyond the grand fact that I was going to the address which the girl had repeated twice in her musical contralto, and that I was mysteriously exalted about it.

"I was steering, you know, and had let things go a bit, I suppose, under the stress of my thoughts, when I realized the boatman was calling to me and waving an arm. I collected my wits and looked round. There was a methodical sound of oars and in a moment a large boat loomed close to us and I saw the ghostly figures of the four rowers, their bodies rising to full height as they plunged their oars in deep and then fell slowly backward to the thwarts. And as the boat moved forward again in one of its long, rhythmical surges and the stern of her came into the faint radiance of our small lantern I saw a bent figure with a fez lean suddenly forward, grasping the gunwale with one hand and his coat collar with the other and stare at us with a fixed, crouching intensity that was familiar. I was perfectly certain it was M. Nikitos, and in the mental excitement of wondering what he might be doing at that hour in a four-oared boat, I was turning my own craft round in a half circle. I heard voices in the fog, the voice of M. Nikitos giving strident orders and hoa.r.s.e growls of a.s.sent from the toiling boatman. The sounds died away and I became aware of other sounds close by, the long hiss and slap of the sea against masonry, and voices. Voices clamouring and protesting and calling aimlessly and interjecting unheeded remarks into other voices engaged in torrential vituperation. And then my boatman stood up suddenly, his tall form rising and falling into the fog like some comic contrivance as the swell tossed the boat perilously near the sea-wall, and uttered a sharp, monosyllabic comment. The voices ceased as though by magic, and a grave question came out of the invisible air, which my boatman, leaning out and laying hold of the stones, answered in a quiet and competent fas.h.i.+on. You must understand that I had not seen this man, yet he had already made that impression upon me. The whole business to me, a strange and somewhat exalted Englishman sitting in a reeling row-boat and wondering whether he was about to be dashed to pieces against the stones, savoured of a carefully rehea.r.s.ed performance. And when a flight of bal.u.s.traded marble steps came into dim view and a tall figure in silk pajamas, a fur overcoat, and a fez came slowly down into the light of our lantern I gave up and just waited for things to happen.

Up above I could now descry the chorus which had been creating such an uproar, a motley collection of male and female retainers in various stages of undress, and holding a number of alarming looking weapons, standing in a row looking down at us in astonishment. And I was just feeling exasperated at being so completely in the dark because I could not understand a word these people were saying, when the tall bizarre person in the fur coat and pajamas leaned over and said:

"'I understand you are an Englishman from one of the s.h.i.+ps?'

"'Yes,' I said. 'That is so. What is the matter, may I ask?'

"'An attempt,' said he, 'at robbery and perhaps upon my life. You saw a boat?'

"'Yes,' I said, 'we saw a boat. Was that the man who has been attempting robbery?'

"'The leader,' said he; 'we have the others,' he looked at his retainers, who looked down at us in a most theatrical way.

"'Do you know who he was--the leader?' I asked. All this time I was sitting in the dancing boat while the boatman fended her off with his long arms.

"'No, I regret not.'

"'I can tell you, if you want to know,' I said. He leaned down to get a good look at me, looked back over his shoulder, and called in a reproving voice, upon which one of his minions flew down with a lantern, and we viewed each other in the glare.

"'I think it will be better if you accept my hospitality,' he said, studying me thoughtfully. 'My carriage will take you back to your s.h.i.+p.'

He spoke again to my man who replied with grave decorum. I saw him now, a tall, sunburned fellow with an immense black moustache, a round flat cap on his black head, and an embroidered coat with innumerable small b.u.t.tons and frogs. He held the boat a little nearer in sh.o.r.e and I stepped on to the sea-worn marble stairway. And without a word, in accordance with the magical nature of the affair, my romantic boatman, who had borne me away from my youth and who had proceeded methodically to bear me onward toward my inevitable destiny, pushed off with an oar into the fog and was lost.

"And I a.s.sure you," insisted Mr. Spenlove in an aggrieved tone, "that I have the same memory of the scene which followed as one has of a complicated dream. I am not prepared, at this moment, to go into a court of law and swear to all that pa.s.sed between myself and that perturbed gentleman in the silk pajamas and the fur overcoat. I was living very intensely at the time, you must remember. The exact incidence of the adventure was not clear to me until I was back on the s.h.i.+p. Even when we sat in an apartment of immense size and sombre magnificence, and he said courteously, 'Have we by any chance met before?' I did not fully wake up. I said:

"'I believe so, but I must admit I have forgotten your name.'