Captain Macedoine"s Daughter.
by William McFee.
DEDICATORY
There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the purple islands beyond the headlands. You will stay there for a while among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and say: "There it is!" And together we will slip and stumble and trot down the steep hillside to the level-crossing, and we will run along to the little station, so like ours in America. And when the train is come creaking and groaning and squealing to a standstill, I shall climb in, while you will stand for a moment looking.... You will wave as we start with the usual prodigious jerk, and then you will run back and climb up to the house again, banging the big iron gate securely shut....
All just as before.
But this time there is this difference, that I am not coming back. I am ordered to return to England, and I am to sail to-morrow morning. Now, as I have told you more than once, it is very difficult to know just how anything takes you because you have at your command an alluring immobility, a sort of sudden static receptiveness which is, to an Englishman, a Westerner that is, at once familiar and enigmatic. And when one has informed you, distinctly if ungrammatically, in three languages, that one is going away for good, and you a.s.sume for a moment that aforementioned immobility, and murmur "_C"est la guerre_," I ask you, what is one to think?
And perhaps you will recall that you then went on brushing your hair precisely as though I had made some ba.n.a.l remark about the weather. A detached observer would say--"This woman has no heart. She is too stupid to understand." However, as I am something more than a detached observer, I know that in spite of that gruff, laconic att.i.tude of yours, that enigmatic immobility, you realize what this means to us, to me, to you.
So, while you are down in the garden, and the light is still quite good by this western window, I am writing this for you. As we say over in America, "Let me tell you something." I have written a book, and I am dedicating it to you. As you are aware, I have written books before.
When I explained this to you you were stricken with that sudden silence, that attentive seriousness, if you remember, and regarded me for a long time without making any remark. Well, another one is done and I inscribe it to you. Of course I know perfectly well that books are nothing to you, that you read only the perplexing and defaced human hieroglyphics around you. I know that when you receive a copy of this new affair, through the British Post Office in the _Rue Franque_, you will not read it. You will lay it carefully in a drawer, and let it go at that. And knowing this, and without feeling sad about it, either, since I have no fancy for bookish women, I am anxious that you should read at least the dedication. So I am writing it here by the window, hurriedly, in words you will understand, and I shall leave it on the table, and you will find it later, when I am gone.
Listen.
The fact is, this dedication, like the book which follows after it, is not merely an act of homage. It is a symbol of emanc.i.p.ation from an influence under which I have lived for two thirds of your lifetime. I must tell you that I have always been troubled by visions of beings whom I call dream-women. I was a solitary child. Girls were disconcerting creatures who revealed to me only the unamiable sides of their natures.
But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who, while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few traits from the ill.u.s.trations in books, were none the less extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of myself--what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives regret, I had been born a girl. And later, when I was a youth, and began to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a definite conception. She was everything I disliked--a tiny, slender creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams she was always clinging to me, which I detested. I regarded myself with contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my temperament. You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism would soon fade. On the contrary, she a.s.sumed a larger and larger dominion over my imagination. I fancied myself married to her, and for days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill. It was summer time, and I lived on the upper floor of my mother"s house in an outlying _faubourg_ of London, from the windows of which one could look across a wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding villas. And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams sitting in a neighbour"s garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward the house with an expectant smile. I sat at my window looking at this woman, some neighbour"s recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her. I wonder if I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all, that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form....
As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the _faubourgs_ and went to live in a studio among artists. Without knowing it, I took the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power. Beyond the shady drives and prim gardens of the _faubourg_ her image began to waver, and she haunted my dreams no more. And I was glad of this because at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known, rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth. I resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art. I was consumed with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to achieve distinction. And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and ideas, as possible. I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations. But before I was aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman. I saw her in studios, where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye.
I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form. I had a notion, too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride, disgust, and fort.i.tude for her to appear in the body. And then things began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity. In the s.p.a.ce of a week I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea.
Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost it. Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow. You come of inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and magic cas.e.m.e.nts, is more in your way. But I know without asking that you will be eager to hear about the falling in love. Indeed this is the point of the story.
The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My G.o.d!
Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen--perhaps it is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion, which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree. The point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about love than about anything else in the world. He accepts almost any subst.i.tute offered to him in an attractive package. I know this because I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about love. The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article. And I fell, as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal Love.
Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I have spoken. Not at all. She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my emotions. But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman. Tell me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen. She was small, thin, and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming concentration of the beam of a searchlight. She had a large number of accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense, since she had never accomplished anything and never would. But the ideal part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her cla.s.s were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood. It was not she whom I loved. Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using men"s slang which she had picked up from college-boys. It was this ideal of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many years from examining her credentials.
That is what it amounted to. For years after I had discovered that she thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued to impose her personality upon me. Whenever I imagined for a moment that I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl"s disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile.
And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of sacrifice. I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of literature from life. And, moreover, although we are accustomed to a.s.sume that all young men have a natural apt.i.tude for love, I think myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond tawdry intrigues and ba.n.a.l courtships, spurious imitations which are exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing. And again, while it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"--the thin book you have so often found by my chair in the garden--that a woman is in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we invest with the vague splendours of our sn.o.bbish and inexperienced imagination. A great pa.s.sion demands as much knowledge and experience and apt.i.tude as a great idea. I would almost say it requires as much talent as a work of art; indeed, the pa.s.sion, the idea, and the work of art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same emotion. And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written.
And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever encountering pa.s.sion. Englishwomen especially. They are afraid of it.
They think it wicked. So they marry him. Though they suspect that he will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned. Everything is done to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic pa.s.sion. And the act of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the great adventure of life!
However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting possibilities to pa.s.s me without investigating them, I was once more in London, in late autumn. I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic--a species of growth.
And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay a reluctance to discover my folly. But convention was too strong for me, and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her. And it was at a picture-show. I remember pondering upon this accident of place as I made my way along Bond Street in the afternoon sunshine, for I could not help thinking of that disdainful dream-woman who posed, in my imagination, as an authority on art. This, I suppose, was due to my prolonged study of the Italian Renaissance, a period to which I had kept my reading for a number of years. I remember giving up my ticket to a sleek-haired, frock-coated individual, and pa.s.sing along a corridor hung with black velvet, against which were hung one or two large canvases in formidable gold frames, cunningly illuminated by concealed electric globes. A haughty creature stood by a table loaded with catalogues and deigned to accept my shilling. And then, feeling strange and _gauche_, as is only felt by the sea-farer ash.o.r.e when he steps out of his authentic _milieu_, I pa.s.sed through into the gallery, a high, dignified chamber full of the quiet radiance of beautiful pictures, the life-work of a man whom I had known. I found myself regretting that fate had not permitted me to remain in such an environment; but one cannot avoid one"s destiny, and mine is to have an essentially middle-cla.s.s mind, a _bourgeois_ mentality, which makes it impossible for me to live among artists or people of culture for any length of time. I should say that the reason for this is that such folk are not primarily interested in persons but in types and ideas, whereas I am for persons. Flowers and trees, perfumes and music, colours and children, are to me irrelevant.
But every man and woman I meet is to me a fresh problem which engages my emotions. The talk about types is incomprehensible to me, for each fresh individual will throw me into a trance of speculation. But only when one has lived among clever people can one realize how tedious and monotonous their society can be. I was thinking about the man who had painted these pictures and how he had delighted to frighten me with his obscene comments about women, when I saw a woman far down on the left, a woman in an enormous hat, holding extravagant furs about her thin form, and talking to a tall, handsome man from between her small white teeth.
For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her ident.i.ty. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one--ominous years in a woman"s life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.
But it was too late. As we drove in a swiftly moving taxi-cab through the gay streets of West London, and on out to Richmond, where she was staying with friends, I knew that in the end I should be free. She was soon to be married, and in her satirical gray eyes I saw a desire to hold me permanently in a condition of chivalrous abnegation. On these terms I might achieve some sort of destiny without endangering her dominion. But I felt the winds of freedom blowing from the future on my face. I did not see then how it would come about: I did not even imagine the long years of moody and unprofitable voyaging which lay before me. But she saw that her own ideal of masculine modern womanhood no longer appeared to me the supremely evocative thing she claimed it to be, so that in time, in time, her power would depart. I can see her now, turned slightly away from me in the cab, regarding me over her shoulder from beneath that enormous hat, studying even then how she could keep me true to that worn-out creed, weighing who knows what reckless plans in her cool, clever brain....
But it was a long time! For years yet I saw her before me whenever I thought of other women, and her disparaging, slightly satirical smile would interpose itself and hold me back from experimenting with fresh emotions. Even when war came and our spiritual and emotional worlds came crashing about our ears, her power waned but did not depart. I had no choice between this shadowy, reluctant fidelity and a descent into regions where I had neither the means nor the temperament to prosper.
And so it went, until suddenly one day the whole thing came to an end.
You will remember how I abruptly abandoned the story upon which I was engaged, and told you I had begun upon a tale you had told to me, the tale of Captain Macedoine"s Daughter? Behold it, trans.m.u.ted into something you would never recognize, as is the way of stories when a novelist of romantic tendencies gets at them! And what I want you to observe is that the inspiration, as far as I am concerned, was based upon your brief yet intensely vivid projection of your life in that dull street in a Saloniki _faubourg_, a street so like many of ours in the _faubourgs_ of London, stretching away into dim, dusty distances; but unlike ours in that beyond it rose ranges of hard, sharp mountains that looked as though they had been cut out of pasteboard, and stuck against a sky so unreal in its uncompromising blueness that it seemed to be aniline-dyed. And as the days pa.s.sed, and the story grew, here by the blue waters of the Gulf I suddenly realized that the spell of the dream-woman had been broken, that behind my story of Captain Macedoine"s Daughter another story was working out--the ghost of a story if you like--the drama of the end of an illusion. My old antagonist had met her match at last. She tried to frighten me with her slightly satirical smile. She invoked the innumerable memories and sentiments in which I had been born and reared. But she had met her match. I took her by the arm and opening the door, thrust her gently outside. And then, while you were down there in the garden, I went on to write the tale of Captain Macedoine"s Daughter.
There is another long-drawn shriek--the train is leaving the station next to ours--and I take a last look out upon the well-remembered view.
Across the shining waters of the Gulf the lights of the city are glittering already against the many-coloured facades, with their marble and cedar balconies, their bright green jalousies and gay ensigns.
Already the war-ships in the _rade_ are picked out in bright points, and the mast-head lights are winking rapid messages to each other. The western sky over the headland is a smoky orange with pale green and amber above, and the moon, an incredibly slender crescent of pure silver, hangs faintly over Mount Pagos. It is quite dark down under the cypresses, and a smell of humid earth mingles with the perfume of the jasmine.
Yes, I am now quite ready. No, I have left nothing behind, except perhaps....
Well, it is for you to say.
_Bairakli._ _W. M._
CAPTAIN MACEDOINE"S DAUGHTER
CHAPTER I
None of the men sitting in deck chairs under the awning were surprised to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H.
M. S. _Sycorax_ had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time.
This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that to the Chief alone the eastern Mediterranean was a known and experienced cruising ground; and when the _Sycorax_, detailed to escort convoys through the intricacies of the aegean Archipelago, awaited her slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi, in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for Rotterdam.
The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of each other"s idiosyncrasies--another way of saying the _Sycorax_ was a happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often acc.u.mulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.
And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an amba.s.sador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had murmured absently:
"On one occasion, I was an amba.s.sador. I will tell you about it some time."
"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster--Inness was an Oxford man who had married into a wealthy merchant"s family. He said "Rotterdam"
because he had once been there.
"Yes," said Spenlove. "Rotterdam for Krupp"s of Essen. For three years Krupp"s took a hundred thousand tons per annum of high-grade ore out of this little island alone. They took it in British bottoms to Rotterdam, and from there it went by way of their interminable ca.n.a.ls to Essen. I know because I helped to take it. It was just about the time, too, that Chamberlain was preaching his crusade against the evils of Germany dumping her steel below cost price on our markets, and I was so indignant about it that I wrote to the newspapers. I often wrote to the newspapers in those days. I suppose we all catch the disease at some time or other. As a rule, of course, nothing happened save that the letter would not be printed, or else printed full of mistakes, with the vital paragraphs omitted for "lack of s.p.a.ce." This letter wasn"t printed either, but I received one in return from a fiery young member of Parliament who had just been returned on the Protective Tariff ticket.
He asked for full details, which I sent to him. I believe he tried to make a question of it in the House, but he ran up against the Consular Service, and that did for him. You see, our Consul here was named Grunbaum.
"More than that," went on Mr. Spenlove, sitting upright in his deck-chair and looking attentively at a near-by ventilator; "more than that, Mr. Grunbaum was resident concessionaire of the mining company, he owned the pumping-plant which irrigates yonder valley, he was connected by marriage with the Greek governor of the Island, who lives over in the tiny capital of Ipsilon, and he, Grunbaum, was the richest man in the Cyclades. That was his house, that big square white barn with the three tall windows and the outside staircase. He was a man of enormous size and weight, and I daresay the people of the Island thought him a G.o.d. He certainly treated them most humanely. Every widow was pensioned by him, which was not very much after all, for they used to have precious little use for money. You could get a bottle of wine and a great basket of grapes and figs for a piece of soap, I remember. He built churches for them, too, like that one perched up there on the rock above his house--snow-white with a blue dome. You may have noticed the other day in the wireless news that the friends of freedom in Greece polished off a few of what were described as reactionaires. Put them up against a wall and pumped _mannlicher_ bullets into them. One of these obstacles to liberty was named Grunbaum, I observed.
"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in Grunbaum"s employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain Macedoine. I don"t suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a very remarkable man for all that. He wasn"t a captain at all, really, you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back, when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, pa.s.sengers, and fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money.
He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn, clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed pa.s.sengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, "Oh, Captain, can we ..." something or other. The skipper was a dried-up little sh.e.l.l-back who hated pa.s.sengers and never came down on the promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in b.u.t.tons, who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. "Captain Macedoine." When he gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical Louisiana n.i.g.g.e.r, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: "All right, sah, Captain Macedoine!" It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England, "retired on a competency," as he phrased it, he retired as Captain Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.
"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laugh; but you have not been to sea as long as I have. Such things are possible at sea. I have had a second engineer from Sunderland, a chap named Philip, who claimed Philip of Spain as his ancestor. There was Captain Gizzard, in my old London employ, who had a genealogical tree which traced the old fraud"s descent from the Guiscards of Sicily. No! Captain Macedoine"s illusions are common enough, I fancy, among men. It was only that instead of trying to master them and clear them away, he cultivated them until they grew to monstrous proportions and he lost sight of reality altogether. Or if you like, he was an artist, working upon himself as material, like those old masters we read about who devoted their lives to the accomplishment of obscure technical excellences that only the _cognoscenti_ could discover and enjoy."
"Possibly," murmured the Surgeon, smiling in the darkness of the evening.
"Well," said Mr. Spenlove, in a musing tone, "of course a certain lat.i.tude of a.n.a.logy is permitted in describing one man to another, if we ever can describe him. That was how Macedoine struck me. The aim of his art was to conceal the artist, which I understand is sound aesthetics.
And it was impossible not to admire his method, his style, if you like.
There was nothing crude in it. So far from leaving nothing to chance, he left everything to chance. Take the case of his daughter. The brat in those days was a G.o.d-send to him. I used to think she was merely an invention, he was so circ.u.mstantial in his subtly shaded allusions. You might say that if she hadn"t existed, the trend of his emotional development, the scheme on which he was engaged, would have compelled him to invent her. As I say, I did believe at one time he had invented her, for he was always inventing something. In some bewildering, indefinable way, we became aware, week by week, month by month, of a fresh touch, a new phase of Captain Macedoine. I don"t pretend to know what final frame he proposed to give to the magnificent picture he was making. Perhaps he didn"t know himself. Perhaps he had no ultimate design. Anyhow we never had it, for as I said, the company was absorbed and we all had to come home.