""Go on," I said, "you have evidently included me in the list. How would you describe it?"
""Well," he replied, rubbing his nose, "from what you tell me, I shouldn"t p.r.o.nounce you in any great danger of anything. We can say you have been suffering from a faith in an impracticable felicity." And he laughed.
""But that is a condemnation of romance!" I protested. He shrugged his shoulders.
""We shall never run short of romance," he declared. "The great thing is to avoid getting mixed up in it or if you do, you mustn"t imagine, as you were about to do, that it can be carried about the world. Of course I know there is a fatal fascination about the idea. I thought of something like that myself at one time. A wonderful experience! But it wouldn"t have done."
""You don"t believe in love then?" I asked, curious to know how the brother of seven sisters regarded this matter.
""Oh, love!" he echoed, shrugging again. "Love is nothing. It happens all the time to everybody. It Is the romantic business I thought you were speaking of."
""You draw a distinction, then?"
""Why, of course. Look here, I"ll tell you. I had a wild, romantic pa.s.sion once. Think of it, a casualty surgeon in a London hospital, carried away, positively carried away. And the subject of it was an Irish colleen. Yes, I was infatuated simply and solely with that girl"s green cloak and hood and her green stockings and black pumps. I have been told since by an Irishman that girls in Ireland never dream of wearing such a rig. That doesn"t matter. I had read of Irish colleens, just as you, for example, might have read of Persian princesses or Russian countesses, and the glamour of it carried me away. And this colleen of mine, with her green cloak which she"d got from a theatrical costumier, represented a romantic ideal. Very nice clever sort of girl, a newspaper woman she was. But it wouldn"t have done. Never try to make an episode anything else. We parted and I believe she"s married now."
""That about sums it up," I said.
""It does. Get a night"s sleep and you"ll see it in the same light. You have had an acc.u.mulation of romantic impacts, and I expect a sea-going life leaves one very much at the mercy of stray impressions. A ship"s surgeon once remarked to me that no human intellect could survive a nautical training." And he laughed again.
"That," said Mr. Spenlove, "was how he talked. A provocative, positive sort of man. There was, if you will excuse the simile, something antiseptic in his character. I could have driven about and talked to him all day. He was charged with sane opinions on life. Humorous, too. When I suggested that Captain Macedoine might not survive his daughter"s death, he made the whimsical remark that illusions of grandeur act like an anaesthetic upon the patient"s emotions. And I shall not forget the last remark he uttered as I stood beside his carriage to say farewell.
The red roofs and domes of the city stretched away below us and I could see the smoke coming over the warehouse from the _Manola"s_ funnel. He had promised to do certain things for me. If you climb up some day to the Protestant cemetery you will find out what some of those things were. And he was good enough to express a hope that I might come to Saloniki again. I replied that I had profited immensely by his conversation and he nodded, saying:
""Yes, that"s right. But what you really need, you know, is what old-fashioned people in England call the consolation of religion."
""That is a novel prescription for a doctor," I retorted.
""Perhaps it is," he admitted, holding out his hand, "but depend upon it, nothing else will do."
""You know the usual stereotyped advice is to get married?"
""You would still need the consolation of religion," he remarked, dryly.
"No, the fact is, real love is too uncertain, too uncommon."
""Surely," I protested.
""A fact," he insisted, simply. "I once picked up the works of a young Arab poetess who afterward slew herself in her lover"s arms. And the burden of all her songs was that the only logical culmination of love, if it be genuine, is death. I offer you that for your Western mind to ponder. Good-bye and good luck."
"And there I was," said Mr. Spenlove, lighting a fresh cigarette, "with a whole brand-new set of consolatory impressions to brood upon, left to pursue my way back to the ship and take up a safe and humdrum existence once more. The episode was over, and it would be unwise to try and make it anything else. And I had been presented with a novel and extremely impracticable test of love which preoccupied by its stark beauty. I had the sudden fancy, as I climbed the ruined wall that runs down from the Citadel and started to thread the narrow streets toward the port, of that Arab poetess, buried in a fragrant and silent garden among cypresses, and her lover, whom I pictured an infidel, keeping her in memory by a bronze statuette. I saw it on a table in his room, a tiny thing of delicate art, the exquisite creature depicted at the supreme moment of death and pa.s.sion. For of course the lover would not adopt that extreme view of his obligations toward love. Full of regret he would continue a mediocre existence....
"And yet," said Mr. Spenlove, standing up and looking out from under bent brows at the faint lifting of the darkness beyond the headland, "and yet, my friends, as I picked my way down toward the port, it occurred to me to wonder whether our Western views are so full of ultimate wisdom as we imagine; whether there may not be something in life which we miss because we are so careful of life. At this moment we are vigorously striving to impose our Occidental conceptions of happiness and justice and government upon a good many millions to whom our arrogant a.s.sumptions of the Almighty"s prerogatives is becoming an incomprehensible infliction. It wouldn"t do, I suppose, to suggest that so far from being a matter of mathematical progression, life has a secret rhythm of its own. And while I was working away at this alarming line of thought, I was pa.s.sing along narrow streets crammed with evidences of desires other than ours. I pa.s.sed women veiled save for their sombre, enigmatic eyes. I pa.s.sed the doors of temples where men lay prostrate upon strips of carpet, the saffron-coloured soles of their bare feet gleaming distinct in the sunlight. I was a.s.sailed by troops of children whose tremendous vitality and unabashed enterprise made me tremble with forebodings for the future. Was it possible, I wondered, if our system didn"t give the less admirable and the cunning among us a long advantage? Which they were beginning to take, I added. I found myself endeavouring to take soundings and find out, so to speak, how far we were off sh.o.r.e. Mind you, it wasn"t simply that as far as I could see we were busily producing an inferior social order. I was trying to think out what the ultimate consequences would be if we continued to dilute and rectify and sterilize our emotions. I wanted to see beyond that point, but I found I couldn"t. I hadn"t the power, and I"m afraid that nowadays I lack the courage as well.
"And then I lost myself awhile in a bazaar where I saw sundry gentlemen from the country hurriedly disposing of short, blunt rifles at a reckless discount for cash, and eventually I came out into a steep street which led down to the sea, a street full of an advancing swarm of armed men and banners and carriages and the shrill blare of trumpets pulsed by the thudding of drums. A squad of motley individuals in civilian garb with red sashes across their bosoms and rifles in their hands marched ahead of a bra.s.s band and breasted the slope. At intervals came carriages containing the leaders of this new regime. I observed the burly person in the fez and wearing a silver star. He sat alone in an open landau, his frock coat gathered up so that his muscular haunches could be seen crushing the salmon-coloured upholstery, his ma.s.sive calves almost bursting out of the cashmere trousers. He held himself rigidly upright, his hand at the salute, his big black eyes swivelling from side to side as the crowd surged up and applauded. He had been a driver on the railroad, I read later on, when his photo, with the silver star, appeared in our ill.u.s.trated papers at home as one of the leaders of the Party of Liberty and Progress. Still an engine-driver, I should say, recalling him as he rode past that morning, not particularly attentive to signals or pressure gauges either, if what we hear be true.
Broad-based he sat there, leaning slightly forward, the tight blue tunic creasing across the small of his strong, curved back, his short, thick feet encased in elastic side boots, his long nails curving over the ends of his fingers like claws. And it occurred to me, as I stood on the marble steps of that office building and watched him being borne upward to the Citadel where no doubt he rendered substantial aid to the cause of Liberty and Progress, that it is to the credit of the despots and cut-throats of history that they were perfectly honest in their behaviour. They sought dominion and got it. They sought gold and got it.
They sought the blood and the concubines of their enemies and got them.
And they rarely deemed it worth while to pretend that they were apostles of liberty and progress. That is one of our modern improvements.... I was musing thus as the platoons of ragged revolutionaries shuffled past, when I found myself gazing at M. Nikitos, seated with crossed legs in the corner of a shabby one-horse carriage, and raising an unpleasant-looking silk hat. He was, I take it, one of the secretaries of the Committee of Liberty and Progress, possibly their future international expert. It suddenly occurred to me that there is a gigantic brotherhood in the world, a brotherhood of those who have never willingly done a day"s work in their lives and never intend to. We have been so mesmerized by the phrase the Idle Rich, that we have completely forgotten that sinister and perilous pestilence, the Idle Poor. Looking at M. Nikitos, with his hair standing straight up on the lower slopes of his head like fir trees on the sides of a mountain and his opaque black eyes staring with fanatical intensity at nothing in particular, one was irresistibly reminded of a fungus. The incipient black beard, which was making its appearance in patches on his chin and jaws, lent a certain strength to the impression of fungoid growth, and encouraged a dreadful sort of notion that he was beyond the normal and lovable pa.s.sions of men. He was, you will remember, a pure man. He sat there, raising that horrible silk hat, exposing, with the mechanical regularity of an automaton his extraordinary frontal configuration, the apotheosis of undesirable chast.i.ty. And he had formed a resolution "which nothing could kill." I don"t doubt it. The resolutions of an individual like that are as substantial and indestructible as he. They persist, in obedience to a melancholy law of human development, from one generation to another. They are as numerously busy just now, under the "drums and tramplings" of the conflict, as maggots in a cheese. They have the elusive and impersonal mobility of a cloud of poisonous gases. They restore one"s belief in a principle of evil, and they may scare us, ultimately, back from their wonderful Liberty and Progress, into an authentic faith in G.o.d.
"And I also," resumed Mr. Spenlove, after a moment"s silence, "formed a resolution, to refrain from any further partic.i.p.ation in alien affairs.
I found that I lacked courage for that enterprise, too. It is, after all, a dangerous thing to tamper with one"s fundamental prejudices. They very often turn out to be the stark and ugly supports of our health and sanity. I resigned, not without a faint but undeniable tremor of relief, the part of a princ.i.p.al in the play. I have harped to you on this point of my relative importance in the story because it was as a mere super that I entered from the wings and it is as a super in the last act that I retire. I think it was the letter and package M. Kinaitsky sent down to the ship which scared me into obscurity. That and the news that the four o"clock express for Constantinople in which he had been travelling had been blown to atoms by the apostles of Liberty and Progress. You can say it completed the cure, if you like. To read that brief note of courteous and regretful reproach was like encountering a polite phantom.
After recording his unalterable conviction that only death or a woman could have prevented an Englishman of honour from keeping an appointment, he begged to trespa.s.s so far upon my generous impulses as to send me the package, fully addressed to his brother in London. He would esteem it a favour if I would deliver it in person. The sudden alarming turn of events rendered it imperative to despatch these papers by a secure and unsuspected hand. Should nothing happen, it would be a simple matter for him to communicate with his brother when the present troubles were over. Otherwise ... and so on. He would not do more than allude to the question of recompense, which would be on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of the obligation. The Captain, no doubt, would consent to keep the package in his safe during the voyage....
"Well, the _Manola_ had no safe, but Jack had a formidable old cash-box in his room, and it was with the idea of carrying out the behests of one who could no longer enforce them that I carried the big yellow envelope to Jack and told him how I came by it. Even when it was condensed to suit his bluff mentality, it was a long story. I was astonished at the abstraction into which it threw him. On the road he returned to it again and again. His imagination continually played round the history of "that gel" as he called her. He could not get used to the startling fact that all this had been going on "under his very nose, by Jingo!" and he hadn"t had the slightest suspicion. "Forgotten all about her, very nearly. And by the Lord, I thought you had, too, Fred."
"And I should like," said Mr. Spenlove, "to have heard him tell Mrs.
Evans. Perhaps, though, it would not have proved so very sensational after all. It is exceedingly difficult to shock a woman who has been married for a number of years. They seem to undergo a process which, without affording them any direct glimpse into the bottomless pit, renders them cognizant of the dark ways of the human soul. Perhaps you don"t believe this. Perhaps you think I am only trying to joke at the expense of a married woman I never liked. Well, try it. Take a benign matron of your own family, who has endured the racking strain of years of family life and tell her your own scandalous history, and she will amaze you by her serene acceptance of your infamous proceedings. So perhaps, as I say, I missed nothing very piquant after all. I had to content myself with the eloquent silence of the respectable but single Tonderbeg, moving about in the cabin, his blond head bent in gentle melancholy, his features composed into an expression of respectful forgiveness.
""But what was your idea, Fred?" says Jack to me on the road home. He wore habitually a mystified air when we were alone together in his cabin. Jack had become settled in life. His movements had grown more deliberate, and his choleric energy had mellowed into an a.s.sured demeanour of authority. You could imagine him the father of a young lady. He sat back in his big chair, motionless save for the cigar turning between thumb and finger, a typical ship-master. He was recognized by the law as competent to perform the functions of a magistrate on the high seas. He no longer plunged like an angry bull into rows with agents. He had arrived at that period of life when all the half-forgotten experiences of our youth, the foolish experiments, the humiliating reverses, come back to our chastened minds and a.s.sist us to impose our personalities upon a world ignorant of our former imperfections. And he sat there turning his cigar between thumb and finger, his bright and blood-shot brown eyes fixed in a sort of affectionate glare upon me, his old chum, who had suddenly left him spiritually in the lurch, so to speak. "What was your idea, Fred? Do you mean to say you hadn"t made any plans for the future at all? Just going to let the thing slide?" And the curious thing about his state of mind was that he was attracted by the idea without understanding it. As he sat watching me, mumbling about the future, and the taking of risks and what people at home would say, it was obvious that he was beginning to see the possibilities of such an adventure. He had a vague and nebulous glimpse of something that was neither furtive sensuality nor smug respectability. "Like something in one of these here novels," as he put it with unconscious pathos. And that, I suppose, was as near as he ever attained to an understanding of the romantic temperament. It was fine of him, for he got it through a very real friendship. "I know you wouldn"t do anything in the common way, Fred," he observed after a long contemplation of his cigar.
""And would you have stood for it, Jack?" I asked him, "seeing that Mrs.
Evans would hardly have approved, I mean." He roused up and worked his shoulders suddenly in a curious way, as though shifting a burden.
""Oh, as to that!" he broke out, and then after a pause he added, "You can"t always go by that. I"d stand for a whole lot from you, Fred."
"And with that, to the regret of Mr. Tonderbeg who was hovering about outside in the main cabin, our conversation ended.
"We bunkered in Algiers and the newspapers gave us the news of the war.
A war so insignificant that most of you young fellows have forgotten all about it. And the captain of a ship in the harbour, hearing we were from Saloniki, came over and informed us that he himself had been bound for that port, with a cargo of stores, but had received word to stop and wait for further orders. He was very indignant, for he had expected some pretty handsome pickings. The point of his story was that the stuff was for Macedoine & Co. who would be able to claim a stiff sum in compensation for non-delivery. I believe the case ran on for years in the courts, and the lawyers did very well out of it.
"And when we reached Glasgow, I took the train to London to deliver the package M. Kinaitsky had entrusted to me. I was curious to learn something of that gentleman"s affiliations in England, to discover, if you like, how his rather disconcerting mentality comported itself in a Western environment. The envelope was addressed to Rosemary Lodge, Hampstead, and I left Mason"s Hotel in the Strand, on a beautiful day in late autumn, and took the Hamstead bus in Trafalgar Square. It was very impressive, that ascent of the Northern Heights of London, dragging through the submerged squalor of Camden Town, up through the dingy penury of Haverstock Hill, to the clear and cultured prosperity of the smuggest suburb on earth. I happened to know Hampstead since I had once met an artist who lived there, though his studio was in Chelsea. I may tell you about him some day. And when I had walked up the Parliament Hill Road and started across the Heath to find Rosemary Lodge, I had a fairly clear notion of what I should find. For of course it was only a lodge in the peculiar modern English sense. It is part of the harmless hypocrisy of this modern use of language, that one should live in tiny flats in London and call them "mansions" while a large house standing in its own grounds is styled a lodge. M. Nicholas Kinaitsky evidently kept up an extensive establishment. There seemed a round dozen of servants.
Two men and a boy were out in the grounds preparing the roses for the winter. A blue spiral of smoke was blowing away from the chimney of the hothouse against the north wall. And the house itself was one of those s.p.a.cious and perfectly decorous affairs which have become identified with that extraordinary colony of wealthy aliens who make a specialty of being more English than the English. There was a tennis-court on one side of the house and a young man with a dark, clean-shaven face stood talking to a girl, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched in what one may call the public-school manner, the coat of arms of an ancient Oxford college glowing on the breast of his blue blazer. And indoors the same influence obtained. The pictures and books and furniture presented a front of impregnable insularity. Even the piano was English. Only a photograph in a frame of silver gilt, on a side table, gave a hint--the portrait of a lady with hair dressed in the style of German princesses of Queen Victoria"s day, the sinuous curve of her high, tight bodice accented by the great bustle. I noted all this, and sat looking out of the window, which gave upon the autumn splendour of the Heath. There was a pond close by, and an old gentleman in white spats was stooping down to launch a large model yacht on the water. A fairly well-to-do old gentleman, by the gold coins on his watch-chain and the rings which sparkled on his hands. I wondered if he were a relative of the Kinaitskys or whether he only knew them. The yacht started off under a press of canvas, and the old gentleman set off at a trot round the edge, to meet it. I doubt if you could have seen a sight like that anywhere else in the world. He was perfectly unconscious of doing anything at all out of the common. And I dare say it is essential to the rounded completeness of English life that funny and wealthy old gentlemen should sail toy yachts on ponds, while cultured aliens ama.s.s fortunes on the Stock Exchange and some of us plow the ocean all our lives.
"And then I was disturbed in my musings by a young lady entering the room, and I rose to explain myself.
"I say she was a young lady, while you will observe I alluded only just now to a girl talking to a young man on the tennis-court. There was that difference. Without giving one any reason for supposing she was married, this one conveyed a subtle impression of being the mistress of the house. She was dark, athletic, simply dressed in black, and extremely plain.
""Father will be back from the city at half-past four," she said, when I had explained my errand. "I am so sorry you will have to wait. You will stay to dinner, of course."
"I said I did not know if I should stay to dinner as a matter of course, but I thanked her. We drifted into conversation and she gave a very clever impression of being a thorough woman of the world. She was not, of course. She was one of those unfortunate beings who are trained in all the arts of life and who become adepts in all those accomplishments which men take entirely for granted, and who are permitted to grow up imagining men are paladins. And when they marry they experience a shock from which they never recover. Being married is such a different affair from looking after your father"s house. When I mentioned my errand, she said her mother and the widowed aunt were at Torquay. Her plain features were suffused with emotion when she mentioned the death of her uncle.
She had been his favourite niece. He always paid them a brief visit when he came to London. Very brief. He had a great many people to see in town. Only last year he had given her a set of pearls. And Madame Kinaitsky was so young--it was tragic. The pater had gone over and met her in Paris and she would live with them in future. She stopped in the middle of this and looked at me.
""You met her, of course, out there?" she asked.
""Oh, dear no," I said. "I am only a very casual acquaintance, you understand. I happened to be on the spot, and the very fact that I was not a regular friend gave your uncle the idea that his papers, whatever they are, would be safer with me. I was only too pleased to be of service. You see," I went on, "your uncle knew a friend of mine, and so....
""A friend of yours?" she queried.
""Yes, a business friend. Your uncle helped him and his daughter. It was the daughter I knew particularly."
""Was she nice?" she demanded, eagerly. "I mean, was she worthy of his help? He was so good. He helped everybody. There is an orphanage in Saloniki which he supported--oh, most generously. And he asked nothing in return. Oh!" she exclaimed, "when I think of his life, always thinking of others and doing good, and how at last he found happiness for himself, and then this...." and she gazed out of the window at the old gentleman, who was in trouble with his yacht, which had capsized just beyond walking-stick reach. "It was like him to trust a stranger,"
she murmured.
""He was good enough to make use of me because I was an Englishman," I replied.
""And that was like him, too," she returned, kindling again. "It was a great grief to him that business prevented him from living with us here in Hampstead. He loved the English ways. He used to say in joke that he would certainly marry an English wife if he could induce any of them to marry him. But of course he met his fate. He wrote hoping we would love her. We shall do that, of course, but----" she looked out again at the old gentleman who had found a small boy volunteer to paddle out, bare-legged, to salve the yacht.
""But what?" I asked.
""She will marry again," Miss Kinaitsky remarked in a low tone. "I am positive. I do not see how we can blame her. She submitted to the arrangement. But she did not love him. We feel it, because he spoke of her in such terms ... it was almost adoration. There was never any other woman for him...."
"A silence fell between us because, as you can easily imagine, I had nothing to offer commensurate with the extraordinary exaltation of her mood. It was plain enough that to a woman like her love could not possibly be what I had conceived it. To her it was a divine flame through which she would discern the transfigured features of her beloved. To her it was a supreme sacrament administered in a sacred chamber whence had been shut out all the evil which impregnates the heart of man. And I sat there wondering. When I left that sumptuous and smoothly running mansion and walked out across the Heath in the dusk toward the Spaniards Inn, I was still wondering whether each of us could be right. And I wonder still. For if it were true that love were what she and her kind imagine it to be, then I had never seen it. To me it had been nothing so transcendentally easy as that. To me it had been an obscure commotion, an enigmatic storm on which the human soul, with its drogue of inherited sorrows, was flung on its beam ends, stove in and dismasted, while beyond, far off, there shone a faint light, the flash of a derisive smile, flashing and then suddenly going out. And even now, in the mists of the acc.u.mulating years, I wonder still."