Captain Macedoine's Daughter

by William McFee

The Surgeon, who had caused this digression, made a vague murmur of protest. Mr. Spenlove drummed on the chair between his legs and shrugged his shoulders, but he didn't turn round.

"I didn't offer to tell you a love-story. Captain Macedoine's daughter, if she means anything, means just this: that love means nothing. She passed through all the dirty little gum-shoe emotions which she inspired on the Manola like a moonbeam through a foul alley. For it is foul, this eternal preoccupation with sex, like a lot of flies over a stagnant, fecundating pool. Beauty! You all talk largely of appreciating beauty, and you don't know, the most educated and cultured of you, the first thing about it. Your idea of beauty is a healthy young female without too many clothes. I tell you, I have seen ships so perfect and just in modelling that I have marvelled at the handiwork of my fellowmen. I have seen cities at sunrise so beautiful I have gone down to my room and shed tears of ridiculous sorrow. And I have seen the patrons of female beauty, too, coming back from the cities to the ships with dry palates, and their neckties under their ears....

"Well! We stood there, and to ease the pressure of the moment she put up the binoculars and swept the little beach, finally coming to rest at the big house—Grünbaum's house. While we had been talking a light had come out on the balcony, and figures began to move about with the precise and enigmatic motions of marionettes. Without glasses I could see Grünbaum seated at a table with a big lamp over his head. Another figure moved to the open side and stood still. I was wondering what this portended when Grünbaum half rose and waved his arms, and the other figure turned and dwindled rapidly into obscurity, suddenly coming into the light again at the other side of the table. And Artemisia said quietly, 'There's father!' and handed me the binoculars.

"To say that I was interested would not put the matter in its true light. I was more than that. There was a fantastic quality in the whole business which was almost supernatural. It is strange enough to meet a person after many years; stranger still to meet one who has made a powerful yet unsympathetic impression upon you—to meet him with all your old dislikes and prejudices washed to a clear and colourless curiosity. But to see such a man as I saw Captain Macedoine, afar off, through an atmosphere charged with the electric blue radiance of moonlight, moving in an alien orbit, animated by unknown emotions—why, it was like seeing a man who was dead and gone to another world! I raised the glasses and focussed them. Captain Macedoine stood leaning heavily on his hands as they grasped the edge of the table, and he was staring straight out at me. Of course he could see nothing beyond the balcony, but the impression was exactly that of a man striving to win back across the gulf to his former existence. And his strained immobility was accentuated by the figure of Grünbaum with his jerkily moving arms, his polished forehead gleaming in the lamplight, the gyrations of his chin as he turned every moment or so and looked up sideways at the other. Grünbaum flourished papers, reaching out and rearranging them, throwing himself back in his chair and beating the table with a folded document to emphasize his words. And every now and again the whole scene grew dim as though it were a phantasmagoria, and about to dissolve, when the smoke from Grünbaum's cigar floated and hung in the still air.

"And I discovered, too, that I had no words in which to formulate the peculiar impressions this scene made upon me. I could find no adequate remark! The girl at my side, reaching out absently for the glasses, made no sign that this scene going on half a mile away was at all strange to her. For all one could gather, Captain Macedoine's daughter was accustomed to see her father submitting passively to the onslaughts of foreign concessionaires every day in the week. I gazed at her as she stood there by the awning-stanchion looking at her magnificent parent, and it was suddenly borne in upon me that it is a miracle we ever learn anything about each other at all in this world. There is nothing so inscrutable as an ordinary human being, I am convinced, and I have been watching them for thirty years. What we know and can tell, even the acutest of us, is no more than the postmark on a letter. What's inside—ah, if we only knew. What? Absurd? By no means. I believe married people do occasionally accomplish it in a small way. I mean I believe they attain to a fairly complete comprehension of each other's souls. But as to whether the game is worth the candle they never divulge....

"Certainly Artemisia did not at that moment. She left me, as every woman I have ever met has left me, groping. She sighed softly and returned the glasses, remarking again, 'Yes, there's Father,' and bade me good-night without a word of explanation. Mind, I don't say I had any right to such a word. I don't even feel sure she understood anything at all about her father's position on that island. The bare fact remains that I expected some explanation simply because I credited her with a character light yet strong, and capable of supporting the weight of her father's confidence.

"For observe; if this girl was ignorant of everything, if she came out here a mere child agape with curiosity, then Macedoine must have been that extremely rare phenomenon, a completely lonely man. And I was not prepared to admit the possibility of such an existence for him. He was one of those men who can live, no doubt, without friendship, but who must have their audience. So much at least I knew of him in the old days in the Maracaibo Line, when he would sit near us in Fabacher's on Royal Street, ostentatiously reading a month-old copy of the London Financial News. It was this incessant urge to inspire wonder which led him to hint, indirectly, that he had been at school at the Charterhouse. Risky? Of course it was risky; and I should never have plumbed the mystery but for a most unimpressionable London purser who informed me there was a ragged school for slum children in the Charterhouse district in the city. Not that it mattered. We were not Macedoine's game. It was the bishops and colonels and eminent surgeons who made the round trip of the West Indies with us whom he wished to impress. Whether he was a fraud or not, he certainly had acquired a way of ignoring common people such as we who go to sea. I knew he would regard good old Jack from such a lofty pinnacle that Jack would appear to him no more than one of the Greek labourers who shoved the little wooden cars along and tumbled their contents into the ship with a terrific clang of ironstone on iron, and clouds of red dust. I followed up this digression in my mind and arrived at the fascinating conclusion that if my recollection served me sufficiently well, he would not recognize me. He never had recognized me. I once had the pleasure of telling him that if his men didn't keep my room clean and tidy I would knock his head off. He never looked up from his desk until my grip on his collar tightened and his body began to rock to and fro. He complained to the Commander, who had been told of the incident by the Chief. 'Is this the engineer who assaulted you, Mr. Macedoine?' says the Captain. Macedoine examined me with a distant, preoccupied air, pressing his lips together and his eyebrows raised. He shrugged his shoulders, opened his lips with a slight smacking noise, and after quite a pause, a most imposing pause, he said he 'really couldn't say; these workmen were all so much alike when they were dirty....' Old Pomeroy—he was the first decent skipper the Maracaibo Line ever had—swung round on his chief steward and retorted: 'Then what the devil are you wasting all our time for?' He swung back to his desk again, muttering and slapping papers here and there. 'Preposterous—doesn't know who assaulted him.... Never heard....' I was standing as stiff as a stanchion waiting for the Old Man to say I could go, when he saw Macedoine pussy-footing it to the door. 'Oh, and Macedoine,' called the Old Man. Macedoine stopped but did not look round. 'I expect the engineers on my ship to be referred to as engineers, not 'workmen.'' Silence, Macedoine looking at the back of his hand and smiling with the corner of his mouth pulled down. 'Understand!' thundered the Old Man, rising from his chair but holding it by the arms. It was so sudden I nearly collapsed. I thought he was going to throw Macedoine through the door. That lofty personage was startled, too. He replied hastily: 'Oh, quite so, Captain, er....' when old Pomeroy sat down and dipping his pen in the ink, shut him up with 'Then don't forget it, and don't wait.'

"I mention this highly unusual episode for a special reason. It happened to provide one specific proof of my theory that Macedoine was an artist in his method of building up that grotesque effigy which he presented to the world as himself. He was like that eccentric rich person who once built a most astonishing house in Chelsea many years ago. You remember? It was called So-and-So's Folly. It stood on a valuable site, and each story was decorated in a different style. The basement was Ph[oe]nician and the roof was pure Berlin. But the horrible thing about that house was, not its bizarre commingling of periods, its terra-cotta tigers and cast-iron chrysanthemums, but the fact that inside it was a hollow, spider-haunted shell. There was not even a back to it. There were no floors laid on the joists, weathered planks blocked up the back, and a few forlorn green statues stood amid a dank jungle of creepers and grass and rubbish. Now that was how Macedoine impressed me, and what I was going to say was that by accident I obtained later a peep into his studio, so to speak, and saw his method of putting up that marvellous front, behind which, as you have already learned, there was nothing save the dreamy dirtiness of avarice and ego-mania. No, the solitary and grandiose idea in his mind precluded all recollection of individual humanity. It was not that he forgot us who had been his shipmates. He had never known us. We had not the wit to be knaves, or the credulity to accept him at his own colossal valuation. We ignored his enigmatic claim to greatness, while he passed sublimely along, disdainful of our obvious virtues. For it is presumable that we had virtues, since the world—anxious for the replenishing of its larders—hails us nowadays as heroes because we prefer the dangers of sea-life to the tedious boredom of a shore-going existence....

"Yes, I saw into his studio, watched the artist at work at first hand. I might claim the honour, indeed, of being one of the lumps of clay upon which he sought to model his design. Surely an authentic witness this; and I dare say the normal artist's material—since we are fond of saying he blows the breath of life into it—might not join in the universal praise bestowed upon its creator, but might indulge in ironic contemplation of its own birth-pangs and the strange fortunes of its pre-natal existence!

"He did not appear, however, as my stimulated imagination had pictured him appearing, to dominate the situation on the Manola and preoccupy us all with his personality and hypothetical power. Like a higher power, he remained invisible, and Captain Evans, going ashore in a boat with Artemisia and her belongings around him, was the first to encounter him in Grünbaum's office. Encountered him, and came back bursting with the most astonishing tidings. I was sitting in my room that evening after tea, having a quiet pipe and a book, when Jack came down.