Command Part 34

Mr. Spokesly plunged straight down the steps of the terrace, past a group of Austrian girls who were taking their seats at a table, and who eyed him with lively curiosity, and started towards the custom house, his companion, whose name was Marsh, hurrying after him.

"By the way," said he. "I would like, some time, to introduce you to some of the crowd. They are really very decent. They have made things much easier for us than you might imagine. Of course, for the sake of my family and myself I have kept well in with them; but quite apart from the expediency of it, it has been a pleasure. You have been here nearly a week now," he went on, smiling a little, "and we have seen nothing of you."

Mr. Spokesly muttered something about being busy all day on the s.h.i.+p, getting the cargo out of her.

"Yes, but why not come round now? It is only just through the Pa.s.sage, near Costi's. I can a.s.sure you they are a very interesting lot."

"Well, it's like this, Mr. Marsh. I'm under orders, you see. And I've got this launch now and I'm not so sure of the engine that I want to get stuck with it after dark. I'll tell you what. I'll come to-morrow, eh?"

And to this Mr. Marsh was obliged to agree. Mr. Spokesly dived into the custom house and made for the waterside, where a number of gasolene launches were tied up. It was one of these which, on account of the gasolene in the cargo of the _Kalkis_, he had been able to get for his own use. He had had long struggles with the engine, towing it out with him to the s.h.i.+p and working on it while the men loaded the barges. Now it was in pretty good shape; he understood it well enough to antic.i.p.ate most of the troubles. He got down into it now and took off his coat to start the engine.

It was not that he did not appreciate the offer of his friend. The crowd alluded to were well enough no doubt--clerks and subordinate officials who had gradually formed a sort of international coterie who met in a wing of one of the consulates. Indeed, one of them lived in a house not far from himself on the hillside at Bairakli. But he was in a mood just now which made him reluctant to mix with those highly sophisticated beings. He wanted to go home. As he steered his launch through the entrance of the tiny harbour and made straight across the Gulf towards the eastern end, he was thinking that for the first time in his life he had a home. And she had done it! With a cool indomitable will she had set about it. He knew he could never have achieved this felicity by himself. She had held out her hand for money and he had handed it over to her. If she had not watched he would not have had nearly so much, she told him, and he believed her. That was the key to his mood. He crouched in the stern of his boat and kept his eyes upon the house, a white spot against the steep brown slope of the mountain. That house, rented from a poverty-stricken Greek who had left most of the furniture, and an old woman, who had lived all her life in the village, as servant, represented for Mr. Spokesly his entire visible and comprehensible future. This was another key to his mood. It was as though he had suddenly cashed in on all his available resources of happiness, hypothecating them for the immediate and attainable yet romantic present. By some fluke of fortune he could see that he actually held within his grasp all that men toil and struggle for in this world, all that they desire in youth, all that they remember in age. But he had no certainty of the permanence of all this, and he lived in a kind of anxious ecstasy, watching Evanthia each day with eager hungry eyes, waiting with a sort of incredulous astonishment for the first shadow to cross the dark mirror of their lives.

As it must, he told himself. This could not last for ever. And sometimes he found himself trying to imagine how it would end. To-night he was preoccupied with the discovery that each day, as the end approached, he was dreading it more and more. He had tried to explain this to her as they walked in the garden under the cypresses and looked across the dark waters of the Gulf, and she had smiled and said: "Ah, yes!" She was still a mystery to him, and that was another grief, since he did not yet suspect that the mystery of a woman is simply a screen with nothing behind it. She smiled in her alluring inscrutable way and he held her desperately to him, wondering in what form the fate of their separation would appear.

And when he saw that she had not come down to the jetty to meet him, as she had done on previous nights, he instantly accepted her absence as a signal of change. Yet at the back of his mind there burned a thin bright flame of intelligence that told him the truth. Evanthia had that supreme virtue of the courageous--her dissimulation was neither clumsy nor cruel. It was as much a part of her as was her skin, her hair, her amber eyes. He knew in his heart this was so and made of it a rack on which he tortured himself with thoughts of her fidelity. Each day the difference between this experience and the shallow clap-trap intrigues he had known became more marked to him. The thought of her out there, hidden away from other men, with her delicious graces of body and lucidity of mind, for him alone, was almost too poignant for him. As he came alongside the little staging, and made fast, he returned again to the foreboding thought of the day. There would come an end. And beyond the end of this he could see nothing but darkness, nothing save an aching void.

Nevertheless, as he came up from the jetty and stood for a moment in the road which followed the curve of the sh.o.r.e, and listened to the sounds of the village that nestled in the valley like a few grains of light in a great bowl of darkness, he was conscious of something which he could not successfully a.n.a.lyze or separate from his tumultuous emotions. He put it to himself, crudely enough, when he muttered: "I shall have to take a hand." He was discovering himself in the act of submitting once more to outside authority. Looking back over his life, he saw that as his. .h.i.therto invincible habit of mind. He saw himself turning round to call the captain. And now he was the captain. And Evanthia's enigmatic gaze was perhaps the expression of her curiosity. She was above all things in the world, stimulating. He found himself invigorated to an extraordinary degree by his intimacy with that resourceful, courageous, and lovable being, who would never speak of the future, waving it away with a flick of her adorable hand and looking at him for an instant with an intent, unfathomable stare. And as he started to climb the hillside, setting the loose stones rolling in the gullies and rousing a dog to give forth a series of deep ringing notes like a distant gong, he saw that the initiative rested with himself. He would have to take a hand.

It would not do for him to imagine they could remain like this in almost idyllic felicity. The s.h.i.+p would be unloaded in a week or so and nothing would remain but to let the water into her after-hold and sink her, according to the commandant's orders, in the fair way. But he could not let himself sink back into a slothful obscurity. He had no interior resources beyond his almost desperate pa.s.sion for this girl who seemed to accept him as an inevitable yet transient factor in her destiny, a girl who conveyed to him in subtle nuances a chaotic impression of st.u.r.dy fidelity and bizarre adventurousness. That was one of the secrets of her personality--the maintenance of their relations upon a plane above the filth and languor of the flesh, yet unsupported by the conventional props of tradition and honour. For she had so just a knowledge of the functions and possibilities of love in human life that he could never presume upon the absence of those props. It amazed him beyond his available powers of expression, that in giving him herself she gave more than he had ever imagined. She had given him an enormously expanded comprehension of character, an insight into the secrets of his own heart. And it was, perhaps, this new knowledge of what he himself might do, that was impelling him to "take a hand." When he reached the gate set in the wall of the garden, he had decided to take a hand at once. He had a plan.

And it would have been a valuable experience for him, advancing him some distance in spiritual development, had he been able to see clearly and understandingly into her alert and shrewdly logical mind when he told her his plan. For she saw through it in a flash. It was romantic, it was risky, it was for himself. It might easily be for her ultimate good, yet she saw he was not thinking of that at all. And because he was romantic, because he visualized their departure as a flight into a fresh paradise, they two alone, she turned to him with one of her ineffably gracious gestures and loved him perhaps more sincerely than ever before. It was this romantic streak in the dull fabric of his personality which had attracted her, even if she had not perceived the emotional repose that same dullness afforded her. It was like being in a calm harbour at anchor compared with that other adventure, which had been a voyage through storms and whirlpools, a voyage that would inevitably end in s.h.i.+pwreck and stranding for her anyhow.

"I could do it," he was saying. "They don't know about it, but that boat is the fastest they've got in the harbour and, with luck, it would be easy to get away."

"To where?" she whispered, looking out into the fragrant gloom of the high-walled garden below them.

"Anywhere," he exclaimed. "Once outside, we'd be picked up. Or we could go to Phyros, and get home from there."

"Home?"

"Yes, home. England. I want you to come with me, stay with me, for good.

I can't--I can't do without you. I've been thinking every day, every night. There's n.o.body else now."

She shot a glance at him. He was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on the floor thinking, in a warm tumult of desire, of the adventure. He saw the boat bounding through the fresh green wave-tops into the deeper blue of the aegean, he steering, with his arm around her form which would be enfolded in that same big coat, making a dash for freedom.

And as she patted his arm gently, she knew he was not thinking of her save as a protagonist in a romantic episode. For to ask her to go to England was, from her point of view, the reverse of a dash for freedom.

In her clear, cold, limited mentality, equipped only with casual and fragmentary tales told by the ignorant or the prejudiced products of mid-European culture, England was the home of debased ideals and gloomy prisons, of iron-hard creeds and a grasping cunning avarice. Her mercenaries were devoted to the conquest and destruction of all that made life beautiful and gay. Out of her cold wet fogs her legions came to despoil the fair places of the earth. And his fidelity, his avowed abandonment of the sentiments of the past, inspired her more with wonder and delight than a reciprocal pa.s.sion. For she was under no illusions as to her own destiny. She, too, knew this would not last for ever. Her quick mind took in all the fantastic possibilities of his plan, and she perceived immediately the necessity of giving her consent. He must be kept in this mood of exalted happiness. Intuitively she knew that she herself fed on that mood, in which he rose superior to the normal level of his days. And in spite of her dismay at the mere thought of going out again upon the sea, leaving everything she understood and loved, leaving a land of whose spirit and atmosphere she was a part, she asked him when he wanted to go.

"Not yet," he replied, still gazing at the ground, and she looked at him with amazement. She could hardly repress an exclamation at his credulity. He actually believed she would go.

"And we will take all our money?" she suggested.

"Yes, of course," he agreed absently. It was part of his happiness to put everything in her hands. There was for him a supremely sensuous delight in the words, "It is all for you. Take it. Without you, it is of no use to me." He was unable to imagine a more complete surrender, nor could he believe that a woman would accept it save at the price of integrity. Evanthia was like that. Money was never her preoccupation, but she never forgot it. She had none of the futilities of book-education filling her mind like dusty and useless furniture, so that her consciousness of money was as clear and sharp as her consciousness of food or pain. And a sudden perception of his faith in her, his profound absorption in his own romantic illusions, struck her to a puzzled silence, which he took for a.s.sent and sympathy. She looked away from him and out across the sea. It was too easy.

"Evanthia," he whispered, and she turned her full, direct untroubled gaze upon him with a swift and characteristic movement of the chin.

"I love you," he muttered and touched her arm with his lips in a gesture of adoration. She looked at him with glowing amber eyes. Sometimes he almost terrified her with the violence of his pa.s.sionate abnegation. She had never seen anything like it before. He became gloomy with love, she noted; and her quick wit transfused the thought into a presentiment. She would break the spell of his infatuation with a quick movement and lure him back to earth with a smile. She laughed now as he touched her.

"Tell me," he said, "you wish to come to England with me?"

"Ah, yes!" she sighed sweetly, nestling against him. "You an' me, in England."

"Some time next week I'll be ready," he said. "You must get plenty of food for the boat. And the money. Bring that."

She sat leaning against him, his arms about her, but at these words she stared past him into the darkness of the room thinking quickly. Next week!

"I am getting the engineer to make me a silencer, the boat makes so much noise," he explained.

"I understand," she murmured absently, slipping out of his arms. She must send into the town, she thought. Amos must go.

"To-morrow," he went on, "I go to the Club in the Austrian Consulate.

Mr. Marsh asked me to go. I may be a little late. You won't mind?"

She turned upon him in the darkness where she was feeling for the lamp, and gave him a blank stare. He never saw it; and if he had he would never have been able to understand that at that moment she could have killed him for his stupidity. He sat in silence wondering a little, and then the emotion had pa.s.sed and she gave her delicious throaty chuckle.

"Ah, no, _mein Lieber_. I do not mind."

"Why do you sometimes call me your _Lieber_?" he asked playfully. "Is it a pet name?"

The lamp was alight and he saw her eyes smouldering as she raised them from the flame she was adjusting.

"Yes, _Lieber_ means love," she said gravely.

"You are not sorry we did not go to Athens?" he asked, smiling.

"To Athens ..." her face for a moment was blank, so completely had she forgotten the ruse she had employed in Saloniki. "... ah, I understand.

Athens? No!" She turned the lamp up and began to set the table for supper.

This was the hour that appealed to him more than anything in their life.

To see her moving about in a loose cotton frock, her bare feet thrust into Turkish slippers, to follow the line of her vigorous supple body beneath the thin material, and the expert rapidity of her hands as she prepared the simple meal of stew and young figs in syrup, red wine and coffee with candied dates, was sheer ecstasy for him. He would sit in the dusk of the window, sprawling in his chair, his head sunk on his breast, breathing heavily as he devoured every motion with his eyes. It never occurred to him to wonder what she was thinking about as she worked with her eyes cast down towards the white table or turning towards the door to call in musical plangent accents to the old woman in the kitchen below. She was an object of love and for him had no existence outside of his emotional necessities. He asked in lazy contentment if she regretted Athens. Her eyes, declined upon the table, were inscrutable as she reflected that the young Jew was even then in the city finding out for her whether any officers had arrived from Aidin. "We'll have a house like this, in England," he remarked, smiling.

"And you will forget all about Saloniki, eh?"

He would expect this, of course, she thought. It was the duty of a woman selected by a romantic to forget everything in the world except himself.

She was thinking of Saloniki even as she smiled into his eyes and nodded. And Saloniki was thinking of her. It was at this hour that Mrs.

Dainopoulos said to her husband:

"You are sure they reached port safe?"

Mr. Dainopoulos, who had heard, by his own intricate and clandestine methods, of the unconventional arrival of his s.h.i.+p in Giaour Ismir, and who was not bothering himself very much about either Evanthia or Mr.

Spokesly since both had served his turn, remarked:

"Yes, all safe."

"You know, Boris, I should never forgive myself if anything happened to her. If he did not marry her as soon as they got on sh.o.r.e. I did it for the best. Encouraged it, I mean. I do believe he was trustworthy."

"Don't you worry, Alice," he said gruffly. "You'll see that girl again.

What you like I get you? I done a beeg business to-day."

"What was that? How much?" she asked with a.s.sumed interest. She did not want to know, but she knew he liked her to ask.