'I could see that Sterghiou was getting very angry; I said nothing, but I think he was uncomfortable beneath my silent criticism. He and his police could regulate the traffic in the rue Royale, but they could not cope with an emergency of this sort. From the very first moment they had been at fault. And they had taken at least twenty minutes to get out the motor-launch. Sterghiou hated me, I feel sure, for having accompanied him and seen his discomfiture.
'Anyway, he felt he must take some sort of action, so he ordered his men to search all the fishing smacks in turn. We went the round, a short throbbing of the motors, and then silence as we drew alongside and the men went on board. Of course, they found nothing. I watched the faces of the islanders during this inspection; they sat on the sides of their boats, busy with their nets, and pretending not to notice the police that moved about, turning everything over in their inefficient way, but I guessed their covert grins, and I swear I caught two of them winking at one another. If I had told this to Sterghiou, I believe he would have arrested them on the spot, he was by then in such a state of exasperation, but you can't arrest a man on a wink, especially a wink when darkness has very nearly come.
'And there the matter remains. We had found nothing, and we were obliged to turn round and come back again, leaving that infernally impudent fleet of smacks in possession of the battle-ground. Oh, yes, there is no doubt that they got the best of it. Because, naturally, we have them to thank.'
'Have you a theory, Alexander?' some one asked, as they were intended to ask.
Alexander shrugged.
'It is so obvious. A knife through the bottom of the boat would very quickly send her to the bottom, and a shirt and a fustanelle will very quickly transform a respectable bank-thief into an ordinary islander. Who knows that the two ruffians I saw winking were not the very men we were after? A sufficiently ingenious scheme altogether—too ingenious for poor Sterghiou.'
IV
These things came, made their stir, passed, and were forgotten, leaving only a quickened ripple upon the waters of Herakleion, of which Julian Davenant, undergraduate, aged nineteen, bordering upon twenty, was shortly made aware. He had arrived from England with no other thought in his mind than of his riding, hawking, and sailing, but found himself almost immediately netted in a tangle of affairs of which, hitherto, he had known only by the dim though persistent echoes which reached him through the veils of his deliberate indifference. He found now that his indifference was to be disregarded. Men clustered round him, shouting, and tearing with irascible hands at his unsubstantial covering. He was no longer permitted to remain a boy. The half-light of adolescence was peopled for him by a procession of figures, fortunately distinct by virtue of their life-long familiarity, figures that urged and upbraided him, some indignant, some plaintive, some reproachful, some vehement, some dissimulating and sly; many vociferous, all insistent; a crowd of human beings each playing his separate hand, each the expounder of his own theory, rooted in his own conviction; a succession of intrigues, men who took him by the arm, and, leading him aside, discoursed to him, a strange medley of names interlarding their discourse with concomitant abuse or praise; men who flattered him; men who sought merely his neutrality, speaking of his years in tones of gentle disparagement. Men who, above all, would not leave him alone. Who, by their persecution, even those who urged his youth as an argument in favour of his neutrality, demonstrated to him that he had, as a man, entered the arena.