"'No,' she said, 'girls like that are too much trouble.'
"'You mean—followers?' I suggested. Mrs. Evans turned red and moved slightly.
"'She wasn't nice,' she replied, coldly, and pronounced it 'neyce.'
"'Oh,' I said, 'I wasn't aware you knew.' She got redder.
"'I don't know what you are talking about,' she muttered. 'As far as I could see, she was very fortunate in getting her passage out free, very fortunate. She was not neyce with Babs. Babs didn't take to her. Children know!'
"'Still,' I said, looking at the omniscient Babs lying back in repletion and trying to decide upon some fresh demand, 'Still, I felt sorry for her, a pretty creature like that, at a dangerous age, you know...' I had to stop, for Mrs. Evans' usually pale features were a dull brick red. Her head was drawn back and she became rigid with disapproval. This is what I mean when I say such women wield enormous power. They are panoplied in prejudice and conventional purity. Mrs. Evans was like that. She was safe. She was a pure woman. I looked at her thin, peaked little features as she replaced the blanket about the kicking limbs of the angel child and thought of that girl with her bright, defiant, derisive smile challenging me to high adventure. Mrs. Evans' function in life was not to challenge but to disapprove. She could endure no discussion of the fundamentals. She could read tales of passion and rape, and not a flicker of emotion would cross that pallid face. But there must be no spoken word. Instinctively she drew back and became rigid, protecting her immaculate soul and the angel child from the faintest breath of reality. In that flat bosom raged a hatred, a horror, of beauty and the desire of it—a conviction that it was neither good nor evil, but simply strange, foreign, unknown, unsuitable; incompatible with the semi-detached house on the Portsmouth Road whose photograph hung on the bulkhead behind her. There was something shocking in the contrast this woman presented to her environment out there. Grünbaum, living under the shadow of his mountain, claiming from the world 'confidence in his dispositions'; Macedoine and his lieutenant devising fantastic skin-games to be played out among the haunts of the old Cabirian gods; Artemisia fighting her own sad little battle with the fates and steeling her soul with reckless resolutions; even old Jack, no bad prototype of the ancient ship-masters who ran their battered biremes up on yonder beach to mend their storm-strained gear—all were more or less congruous with this old Isle of Ipsilon, where Perseus grew to manhood and from whose shores he set out on his journey to find Medusa. But not she. She transcended experience. To know her made one incredulous of one's own spiritual adventures. One nursed indelicate and never-to-be-satisfied curiosities about her emotional divagations. She once confessed, in a tone of querulous austerity, that she 'lived only for the child.' Possibly this was the key. Beauty and Love, and even Life itself, as men understood them, were to her the shocking but inevitable conditions of attaining to an existence consecrated to her neat and toy-like ideal. I am only explaining how she impressed me. As you say, she was, and is, simply a respectable married woman. But respectable married women, when you live with them without being married to them, are sometimes very remarkable manifestations of human nature.
"Yes, I used to watch that woman on the voyage home. I was full of curiosity about her. I was loth to believe in a human being so insensitive to what we usually call human emotions. There was difficulty about getting her ashore in Algiers. It was only when Jack said she would get smothered in coal-dust if she stayed that she consented to go at all. She came back with a very poor opinion of Africa. It appears that it was hot and they did not know at the café how to make tea. A mosquito had had the effrontery to bite Babs. I was informed of this momentous adventure after we had gone to sea again, though Mrs. Evans had been cultivating a certain evasion where I was concerned since our talk about Artemisia. She had sheered off from me and tried to pump Jack about the girl. He came to me, his bright brown eyes globular with the news. What did I know, eh? Missus was saying she'd heard there was something fishy about the gel. Not that he'd be surprised. It only showed, he went on, how particular a man had to be. Gel like that ought to be married. Mrs. Evans was very particular whom she had about. Always had been. I knew, of course, how carefully she'd been brought up. A lady. There was something about that gel ... no, he never could give it a name, but he didn't like it. Bad for the kid. Children knew. And they were the devil for picking things up. Here was Angelina, only the other night, getting him into a regular pickle because she'd heard him say 'damn' and brought it out plump in front of Mrs. Evans. Couldn't be too careful. Fancy a kid that age saying a thing like that—'Damn by-bye, damn by-bye!' Jack's eyes grew larger and more prominent. Mrs. Evans had been very upset when he had remarked irascibly that a ship was no place for a child anyway. No more it was. 'Fred'—(I could see this coming, mind you, a week before)—'Fred, my boy,' said he, 'I shall be glad when we get home. I can see it now. It's a mistake. I always said so when the commander brought his wife along.' It didn't do to take a woman away from where she belonged. She saw too much, as well. What did I think she said the other day? A fact. 'You and Mr. Spenlove don't seem to me to do much.' Think of that! And sometimes he wondered if she didn't pay more attention to that infernal pier-head jumper, Bloom, than to her own husband. I should hear him at the cabin table—'When I was commander, Mrs. Evans, I always insisted on the junior officers overseeing the routine of the ship. When I was commander, I made it a rule that engineers should keep to their own part of the ship.' It was enough to make a man sick, but women didn't know any better.... Glad to get home. Was I going to Threxford?
"Well, no, I didn't go down to Threxford. I went to the station to see them off from Glasgow, though. Mrs. Evans held up the angel child for me to kiss. 'Kiss Mr. Spenlove, Babsy, darling.' The youngster favoured me with one of her bold, predatory stares as she desisted from torturing her immense teddy bear for a moment. I had a sudden and disconcerting vision of Jack's daughter as she would be-well, as she is to-day, I expect ... a robust, self-centred, expensively attired autocrat, ruling her parents, her friends, and her adorers with the smooth efficiency of a healthy tigress. Jack once muttered to me that she'd 'knock the men over' and he seemed to take a certain grim relish in contemplating the future overthrow of the love-sick swains. And I saw in the background of this vision, as one sees a pale bluish shadow of a form in the background of a bright, highly coloured portrait, I saw Mrs. Evans, shrinking as the angel child developed, and cowering before that nonchalant vampirism. A well-nourished young cannibal, I figure her, for such characters need human beings for their sustenance, if you take the trouble to observe their habits. I suppose she regarded me as indigestible, for she kissed me without rapture, and I never saw her again.
"And the next voyage we slipped back into our usual jog-trot round. Mr. Bloom, that fine flower of professional culture, was replaced by one of our skippers who had lost his license for a year for some highly technical reason. Jack was rather perturbed by the prospect of having a brother-captain under him, but the new chief-officer was temporarily stunned by the blow fate had dealt him and was a good fellow anyhow. Young Siddons, who was able to carry on by the time we sailed, said he was a jolly decent old sort. Young Siddons and I had a good many talks together that voyage. He was in sore need, you know, of somebody to confide in. We all need that when we are in love. It has been my lot, more than once, to be favoured with these confidences. Tactless? Oh, no. As the Evanses said about children, these young hearts know. Yes, we talked, and I received fresh light upon the mysteries of passion. As Jack had said, young Siddons was the sort to take it hard. His face grew thinner and there was a new and austere expression in his fine gray eyes. We say easily, oh, the young don't die of love! But don't they? Doesn't the youth we knew die? Don't we discover, presently, that a firmer and more durable and perhaps slightly less lovable character has appeared? So it seems to me. Not that Siddons was less lovable. But the gay and somewhat care-free youth who had laughed so happily on the voyage out when the girl had stopped for a while to chat with him was dead. He had a memory to feed on now, a sombre-sweet reminiscence dashed with the faint bitterness of an inevitable frustration. He took it out of me, so to speak, using me as a confessor, not of sins, but of illusions.
"He enlightened me, moreover, concerning the mishap which had befallen him and thrown him so definitely out of the race. He had met M. Nikitos on his way up to keep his tryst. She was standing at the door above them, silhouetted against the light, when they met on the path below. In darkness, of course. The lieutenant of the Anglo-Hellenic Development Company had adopted an extremely truculent attitude. He did not allow, he said, people from the ship to seek interviews in that clandestine manner. Ordered young Siddons to depart. Which, of course, an Englishman couldn't tolerate from a beastly dago. Punched his head. M. Nikitos, familiar with the terrain, had flung a piece of rock, and young Siddons, stepping back quickly in the first agony of the blow, had fallen over the edge, where I had found him. This was illuminating. It explained a number of obscure points which had puzzled me. I wondered, as I heard it, whether the recital of this feat to Captain Macedoine and his daughter had made any difference in the latter's attitude toward the victor. She had not regarded him with any enthusiasm when I had talked with her on the cliff, I noticed. I wondered. For you must be prepared to hear that I was tremendously preoccupied with thoughts of her at that time. That is one of the inestimable privileges of being a mere super in the play. You haven't much to do and you can let your mind dwell upon the destiny of the leading lady. You can almost call it a hobby of mine, to dwell upon the fortunes of the men and women who pass across the great stage on which I have an obscure coign of vantage. Some prefer to find their interest in novels. They brood in secret upon the erotic exhalations which rise from the Temple of Art. But I am not much of a reader, and I prefer the larger freedom of individual choice.