Captain Macedoine's Daughter

by William McFee

"'But,' said Mrs. Sarafov, and she turned her eyes upon her younger daughter, who was going out with some dishes, 'But she must have a man to look after her.' She regarded me attentively. 'I suppose you know that she is very fond of you. She is always talking about how kind you were to her on the ship. And in London. She says you liked her at first. And I can't see,' she went on, 'why, if you regret it, as you say, you didn't look after her yourself. She would have gone.'

"'And you think that would have made any difference?' I demanded. I was very much disturbed at this sudden turn of things. I seemed to be getting away from my cherished position as a super in the play. And it was the emotion educed from this conversation that revealed to me how these women had abandoned their life in America without regret. I had a vision of it suddenly as I looked at the other daughter's face. She was regarding me with a sort of raptness. The exquisite features glowed and the bright, bronze-coloured eyes burned above purple shadows like lamps above dark pools. Yes, I had a vision of it suddenly, and it was what we call, lightly, cynically, disapprovingly, Romance. It was simply this—that to them, what we deem a dangerous and useless appendage of our spiritual life is a tremendous and vital need. So tremendous and so vital that the external moral aspect of it was a matter of little importance. To put the case in point, they were interested in me not because I was a moral Englishman but because Artemisia was fond of me. It was for them as simple as breathing to go with the being one loved. And back of that there was another thing, which scared the modern and moral being within me still more. It followed, from their perfectly naïve and innocent faith in Romance, that a woman was not a political equal of man, a strenuous co-educated, enfranchised voter, but a possession. The crown of her achievement was to be possessed by the man she loved. He might kill her or enslave her, but without men she was of no importance whatever. And I suspected that my own attitude which, mind you, is the attitude of most of us, to draw away at the approach of a compromising emotion, was difficult to comprehend. Especially when, in response to the inevitable question, I said I wasn't married or promised. They harped on it, those two, while the younger girl was in the kitchen. It was evident Artemisia had confided a great deal to them and they had talked and talked, turning this peculiar problem over in their minds, the problem of a man who persisted in remaining a super in the play. Barbarous of them? Well, let us say mediæval. They lived in a world of harsh limitations and extraordinary latitudes. They were forbidden divorce and were accustomed to neighbours with a plurality of wives. They seemed to know nothing of the refinements of modern passion. For them it was a question of sex, without any admixture of social or racial distinctions. That Artemisia had had a lover in England was not a matter of amazement to them at all. What they couldn't understand was the reason why everything had to be driven underground. And the extremely bourgeois conception of love culminating in a colourless civil contract between a good provider and a capable housekeeper, which was all they could see in American institutions—a civil contract which could apparently be shot to pieces upon any frivolous pretext, struck their mediæval minds as profoundly irreligious and unpleasant.

"And then," said Mr. Spenlove, suddenly turning and savagely addressing the silent and recumbent forms in the darkness of the awning, "I made another astonishing discovery. They respected Captain Macedoine. A nice old gentleman! They thought he was fine! I give you my word, when they told me that, and proposed that we go right in and see him, I obtained a glimmer of what Nietzsche must have meant when he spoke of the transvaluation of all values. I was startled by the sudden realization of how tenaciously I had been holding to my belief in that man's essential unworthiness. You regard a man for years as despicable and rotten, judging him as though you were God, and then you meet a woman who worships the very ground he treads on, or a child to whom he is a fanatically fond parent. Of course, the enthusiasm of Monsieur Nikitos for his patron was discounted for by my low estimate of Nikitos himself. Possibly, I mused in a startled way, as we entered the dark ante-room of Captain Macedoine's abode, M. Nikitos was regarded by a septuagenarian mother as an angel of light. The possibility remains in suspense, for of that gentleman's antecedents I don't recall any particulars. I saw him again, as you shall hear, but he failed to prepossess me in his favour. He departed from my view, a perplexing and polysyllabic problem, claiming for himself a useless and preposterous purity. But perhaps it was not so useless from his point of view. Perhaps he owed his brief political omnipotence, when the whole country flamed into battle, murder, and sudden death, to his peculiar mania for a spectacular chastity. They say men fear such freaks, and deem them endowed with sinister supernatural powers. Possibly. There are strange things embedded in that fierce lava-flow of the Balkan volcanoes, congealed agonies and solidified monstrosities of soul.

"At first I could see nothing save that the chamber was large and lofty. Even at the moment it struck me—a sort of last attempt at superiority, you know—that it would be just like Captain Macedoine to live in a large and lofty chamber without much light. And then, as I saw him, propped up among cushions on an immense bed, with a table close at hand on which reposed writing materials, books, a photograph, and a small shaded lamp, I wondered why the characteristics which in him had created such animosity should take the form of an alluring hypnotism in his daughter. Such thoughts make one uneasy and anxious for one's position as a super in the play. For that was the upshot of it, that I was shakily anxious to see her again, to see Captain Macedoine because he was her father, to drift, I knew not where. I was a pretty spectacle to myself, I can assure you!

"His illness had emaciated him, and the crimson bedspread, together with the long, drooping folds of the looped-up mosquito-bar, like the curtains of a catafalque, and a round cap he wore to cover his bald spot, gave him the air of some old pope holding an audience. He raised his eyes without lifting his head, and smiled as Madame Sarafov and her daughter, with measured strides that reminded one again of the larger carnivora, moved forward to the bedside. And he lifted his hand in a decidedly pontifical fashion, as though to bless them. I remained for a moment in the shadow before they turned and explained who I was; and the pale blue eyes, without any recognition, beamed upon me as upon a new and promising adherent to the faith. He was immensely improved, though very much nearer the grave than when I had seen him for that dubious moment through the window of his house in Ipsilon. The harsh ravages of a life of distorted ideals had been softened by illness to an ascetic benignity. And he talked. I was obliged to admit to myself that so far I had never seen him in private life. He talked and he was full of reminiscence. He had a musical tenor voice, and he spoke rapidly and with an unconcerned change from subject to subject which might be set down to garrulity. He gazed into the shadows as he talked and I listened, very much astonished. For it was not the talk of a wicked man or an unhappy man or even an unsuccessful man. It was rather the talk of an intelligent humbug, such as one might expect from the super-annuated and senile secretary of some rich and fantastic scientific society. He gave one that impression, that his whole life had been one of gentle dilletantism under the protecting shadow of giant vested interests. It was an astonishingly picturesque scene, the sort of genre picture the Victorians did so well and for which we moderns have so profound a contempt. It might have been called 'The Old Professor Tells His Story.' It flowed from him. He had a fund of phrases, quite common no doubt, but which he used as though he had invented them himself. His long, rose-tinted, transparent nostrils moved at times. His hands lay on the bedspread, singularly small and chunky for so large a being, and he often withdrew his gaze suddenly from the shadows of the past and examined his knuckles with a sharp scrutiny that, I suppose, was merely a habit born of an unconscious reflex action, but gave one a notion that at times he began to doubt his own reality.

"And then," said Mr. Spenlove after a pause, "I discovered that Captain Macedoine belonged to that class of raconteurs who do not believe in reticence on personal matters. I have very little of that sort of squeamishness myself, but he was much more confidential. If confidential is the word. Because there was no atmosphere of confession about his story. He frequently interjected the words, 'you know,' and it really seemed as if he assumed that we did know, and was just amusing himself. Or perhaps he was rehearsing for the day of judgment. No matter. He ran on. And we listened. We were interrupted once, when an elderly person, 'My housekeepah,' as he called her, 'Madame Petronita,' came in with some sustaining liquid in a basin. And if you ask me what he talked about, I should say that he furnished us with a large number of details of his private life which the majority of us never mention even though we may not be ashamed of them. At this distance of time it presents to me the sort of memory which one retains of an interesting book read long ago. I remember him, you see, because of what happened afterward, because he was the father of this girl of whom I am telling you, and I recall the picture of him dispensing those amiable garrulities because it was as we sat there that the notion first came to me that he was really an original artist working upon himself and concealing himself behind the grandiose presentment of an impossibly superior and effulgent human being. All I had known of him or heard of him in the old days corroborated this notion of mine. 'We are a very old family, you know—I was a younger son, you know—I was at Charterhouse School, you know—we were very poor—a scholarship boy, you know.' This was addressed to a certain extent to me, as an Englishman, of course, but the glamour of his rich intonation enveloped those two beautiful women, mother and daughter, sitting there with their perfect parted lips and their extraordinarily seductive Slavonic eyes. It would be interesting, no doubt, to know just what they imagined lay in the portentous statement that Captain Macedoine had been sent as a poor boy—a day boy, he informed us meticulously—to that ancient foundation known as the Charterhouse—they with their oriental antecedents, their untrammelled comprehension of the romantic value of life, and their initiation into western ways in a Brooklyn apartment. Yet I'm not sure that deep did not call into deep, that they did not succeed in getting hold of his real meaning after all. As Mrs. Sarafov said to me afterward in the intense darkness of the street, 'Captain Macedoine, he goes 'way back, I guess'; and there was a peculiar inflection in her tone which brought to mind echoing corridors in the house of life.

"Yes, he was a younger son and he went out into an unsympathetic world as a 'secretary'. Became a land-steward on great estates, secretary to a London club, which fell on evil days, and was—in short—shut up. Travelled for a while. I like that. It gave the obliging human imagination such scope in which to devise a romantic and Byronic pilgrimage for him. Accepted a post as purser on a grand duke's yacht. He began to move in exalted circles. Grand duchesses, princesses of principalities, eccentric millionaires, oriental potentates, and English nobles with Mediterranean villas came upon the stage and performed various evolutions which brought them into touch with the Grand Duke's purser. He was thanked for his services on one occasion by a fat, pop-eyed voluptuary who has become famous in history for scientific and cold-blooded political murders. Was offered a cigarette from the Imperial case which he accepted of course, but did not venture to smoke. Indeed, murmured Captain Macedoine with a faint smile, he had it still. 'My dear,' he addressed the girl Pollyni, 'if you will bring me the bag in the top drawer over there....' She came back into the circle of light bearing a small black bag of formidably heavy leather, the handle-straps sewn right round the body of it and the bronze hasp fitted with a massive brass padlock. It was a bag to inspire awe; and yet it made me smile. On one side the thick leather had been carefully pared away in three places. You see, I recognized that bag at once as one of the specie carriers of the Maracaibo Steamship Company, whose initials M. S. C. had been removed. It reminded me that after all I had known this personality, in the making, when he had not yet realized all his magnificent possibilities. In those days the furtive theft of a leather bag was all in the day's work. But when I looked at him again I was almost afraid to believe my own memories and conclusions. He held the bag before him, his small chunky hands gathered together on the handles, and gazed into the shadows with an expression of gentle and refined melancholy upon his face, as though he knew there might be nothing in the bag after all.

"But there was. There were things in that bag I couldn't have believed existed out of a museum or a grand-opera property-room. There were his epaulettes and other insignia as a grand duke's purser, thick slices of gold and silver lace, buttons as large as medallions, and a badge like some ancient coat of arms done in glittering enamel. There were russia-leather boxes whose frayed edges still bore traces of exquisite gold-tooling and which, on being opened, bore within, delicately printed on their satin lining, the strange names of oriental and Levantine jewellers. And in one of these boxes, an oblong affair like the case of a cigar-holder, we were permitted to behold the cigarette which the great potentate had deigned to offer the Grand Duke's purser. A fat oval thing bearing an imperial monogram in gold. Captain Macedoine regarded it reverently as it lay on his palm. From His Majesty's own case, he observed in a deep abstraction. Part of the Old Order. Soon to go.... He spread out his bizarre possessions on the coverlet and showed us each in turn. There was a slip-ring for a cravat, of gold so heavy it could never be used, and with an incongruous emerald like a lump of bottle glass clamped to the centre of it. There was a stick-pin with a perfect knob of silly-looking rubies. There were cuff-buttons like Brazil nuts and about as beautiful, with diamonds in an eruption around the edges. There was a gold stop watch in a hunter case, with a chime and a coat-of-arms. And there was a gold cigarette case like a polished slab, almost insolent in its sheer, naked pricelessness. These, it appeared, were tokens of recognition from various wealthy personages who had been guests on the Grand Duke's yacht. It was customary, you know. There had been many others, which he did not regard with any particular sentiment, and had sold or exchanged for feminine trinkets for his dear Euphrosyne. There was a movement on the part of the two women as he pronounced this name and I looked at the girl. She met my gaze with a radiant smile and a little nod that seemed to mean 'Now we are coming to it.' As we were. For Captain Macedoine went on to inform us that one of the penalties of his wanderings among princes and plutocrats was an almost monastic habit of life. It would not have done, you know. He was the repository of discreet confidences, the inarticulate witness of august privacies. He occupied a position, so he seemed to imply, similar to that of the eunuchs of oriental empires, in so far as he was supposed to have no ascertainable human attributes beyond cupidity and intelligence. A seneschal! So it fell out that the Grand Duke, whose photograph showed a much be-whiskered person with very long thin legs and a huge nose, found himself without a purser one day. Captain Macedoine resigned. Under ordinary circumstances he would have returned to England and settled on a small estate in the country. But the circumstances were not ordinary. He had become the last of his line. The Macedoines had been dwindling for centuries. Did I believe in hereditary destinies? Families do die out, you know. So instead of taking the P. L. M. express from Cannes to Paris and so on to London, he took a passage to New York. First class, you know. As we reached this particular stage in Captain Macedoine's reminiscences, a brief and extraordinarily concentrated expression came into the pale blue eyes fixed on the shadows beyond the bed, his hands and nostrils remained momentarily rigid, as though a sharp memory had gone right through him and bereft him of all volition. And his eyes, closing, seemed to take his life with them and he became a corpse enjoying, let us say, a siesta. And this paroxysm, which gave me an uncomfortable feeling that Captain Macedoine was omitting the really interesting details of his departure from the Grand Duke's yacht, was construed by the Sarafov women as a symptom of mental anguish; and the girl, with a gesture almost divine in its exquisite and restrained impulsiveness, touched his arm. A smile suffused the man's features before he opened his eyes and turned them upon her with sacerdotal graciousness. The thing was so unreal that I was lost in a turmoil of effort to retain my hold upon actuality. The histrionic instinct gives one strange jolts when viewed close up. And through that turmoil I heard him telling them, as he had done before often enough no doubt, the story of how he met his dear Euphrosyne in the old French Quarter. And as he often said, you know, his dear Artemisia was the living image, you know, of her dear mother. His hand moved absently and the girl, anticipating his desire as though they had rehearsed the performance many times, leaned forward, took a photograph from the table, and handed it to me. His dear Euphrosyne!

"Well, it wasn't so very like his daughter after all, not really so like her as Pollyni was like Mrs. Saratov. The woman in the photo was undeniably beautiful, but it was the beauty of the octaroon. The large eyes and the full, sensuous lips expressed with sombre emphasis the great enigma of race. In her daughter this enigma had been transmuted into an intensely personal thing, a seductive mystery that made men love her at the same time that it overshadowed love and filled them with anxiety for their spiritual safety. There was none of her radiant, aggressive insouciance in the photograph. It was the portrait of a clinging and rapacious female. A soft and delicious parasite, the victim of an immense and tragic error. I heard Captain Macedoine, while I sat with the photograph in my hand, telling of the almost incredible happiness of his home life in the little wooden cottage amid the tall grasses out on Tchoupitoulas Street. It all came back to me as I listened. The clangour of the box-cars being switched where the trolley bumped along the docks; the dry and dismal stretch of Poydras Street in the evening, the stark warehouses of Calliope, and then mile on mile of verandahed shabbiness, getting more and more open, with fields and cross-roads running down into mere vague vacancies, or perhaps a shy, solitary cottage. And the extraordinary sunsets over the lake—sunsets like vast flat washes of crimson and gamboge and violet, which were wiped out as by a hasty hand and left the wide-spaced faubourgs a prey to the murmurous onslaught of insects and the hollow boom of enormous frogs. And the two women sat in rapt silence, absorbing the romantic story with its romantic setting. An artificial story, if you like, as everything about Captain Macedoine was artificial. It was almost as if he had achieved his destiny by coming at last to that extraordinary concoction of artificialities which we call New Orleans, where dead civilizations lie superimposed one upon the other like leaves in a rotten old book, where you can cut down through them, from the mail-steamer and the trolley-car and the fake religion, right down to the poisonous swamp and the Voodoo frenzy. It was a place whose very silences were eloquent of sadness and frustrated achievement, and he chose it as the scene of incredible happiness! For he conceived an affection for the city which led him to say in so many words that it was the only possible place to live, in the United States. His patrician up-bringing and cosmopolitan career, it seems, had brought him to the same view of our western civilization as Mrs. Saratov. It was this peculiar notion once more obtruded upon me that stung me into speech with him.

"'You really think that?' 'You prefer this sort of place, for instance, to New England?'