"'Ammunition?' I repeated, rather suspecting his sanity. This was in 1912, remember.
"'Dear me, yes,' he answered with another pitying smile. 'Didn't you know really? There will be war you know. Next week possibly. Perhaps to-morrow. Why,' he added with considerable animation, 'it might start to-night!'"
CHAPTER VII
Mr. Spenlove, seated on the extreme edge of his little deck-stool, his knees out, his hands lightly inserted in his trouser pockets, paused again in his narrative and looked over his shoulder as the quartermaster at the gangway rang four bells. The moon was gone behind the vast mass of rock which had been used by him as a material background to the fantastic tale he was telling in his own introspective and irritating manner. Out beyond the sharp black silhouette of the headland the open water was a dazzling glitter that contrasted oddly with the profound obscurity of the tiny haven. From time to time a silent form had risen from the chairs beneath the awning and gone forward to the navigating bridge, returning in the same unobtrusive fashion. And as Mr. Spenlove paused, and the clear-toned bronze bell rang four strokes that echoed musically from the cliff, another form, moving with care, emerged from the ward-room scuttle and set down a tray on a small table. There was a movement among the deck chairs as feet came down softly and felt for discarded shoes, and the surgeon, clearing his throat noisily, stood up and yawned. One by one the officers who had thus elected to pass a night in conversation took from the tray a cup of the British Navy's celebrated cocoa and returned to their chairs. Mr. Spenlove, still sitting upright and looking round as though he expected someone to contradict him, put out his hand, and the night-steward placed in it the remaining cup before moving off and vanishing into the shadows, shot by gleams of brass handrails and polished oak, of the companion. Mr. Spenlove, his head cocked slightly on one side, his dark elvish eyebrows raised satirically, and his sharp, short beard moving slightly, stirred his cocoa. He betrayed no concern as to the state of mind of his audience. He was well aware that the perfect listener does not exist. The novelist is more fortunate. For every hundred persons who deign to take up his book and trifle with it for an hour, putting it down upon the slightest pretext and perhaps forgetting to finish it, there will be one enthusiast who savors every word, notes the turn of a phrase, and enjoys the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the style. One must not expect this when telling a tale, except perhaps when one is a boy, and the dormitory is hushed to listen, and one goes on and on until honest snores register satiety. Mr. Spenlove, stirring and sipping his cocoa, stared straight across at Grünbaum's house, which the current had now brought before him, and composed his thoughts before going on to the final conclusion of his story. He was moved somewhat himself because the mere act of narration had evoked memories whose strength he had perhaps underestimated since they had remained dormant so long, and the immediate stress of the great conflict, in which they were all leisurely participating, had led him to imagine that the world before the war was dead and gone. Which it wasn't, he reflected, setting down his cup and beginning to roll a cigarette ... not by a long shot; and remained silent yet a little longer, marvelling at the extraordinary triviality of such things as war, against the sombre verities of Race and Love and Despair.
And then he suddenly became aware that the shoes had been again softly discarded, and he heard the creak of the trestles as the navigating officer stretched himself on his camp-bed alongside the hand-steering gear. Rolling a cigarette Mr. Spenlove began again.
"I doubt if you can conceive now," he remarked, "how that bland announcement of a possible war before morning startled and shocked me. I doubt if anybody realizes how such things tore our hearts before those autumn days in nineteen fourteen. Some of you may remember when war was declared between England and the Boer Republics. Quite a little thrill in London; a romantic feeling that the die was cast, and all that sort of thing. But that was far away across the sea, a diminutive business which it pleased us to consider one of our punitive expeditions. War, the collision of European hosts, was a subject for literature and art. It wouldn't ever happen again. The Turks and Italians had been at war and it had been a decorous affair involving some nebulous actions in Cyrenaica—a locality we had never heard of before—and a few amusing incidents at sea. I remember we were pursued all one morning by an indignant Italian scout-ship during that war, who wanted to know why we hadn't stopped at her signal. I believe, as a matter of fact, the mate on the bridge had been making himself a hammock and hadn't seen anything. And when they did catch us up our skipper simply broke out the Red Ensign, showed his codeflags, and went ahead. War? We hadn't any conception of what the word meant. Our troops were always walloping some tribe or other in India and so forth, and we lived in a peaceful, orderly world.
"But Captain Macedoine's remark that war might break out at any time had something, intangible if you like, to corroborate it. It was in the air. It was very evident in that crowded café when the robust gentleman in the frock coat and fez and wearing a silver star was working his hearers up to a hoarse, guttural frenzy about something—probably our old friend Liberty. There was a destroyer in the harbour near us—a dingy-looking and obsolete craft with low, sullen funnels and a disagreeable array of torpedo-tubes with the fat snouts of torpedoes lurking under the hoods. In those days a war-ship of any sort made one think all sorts of chaotic thoughts. And now he had mentioned it to me, a good many other things came to mind which pointed toward some readjustment of power. Our sudden charter for Saloniki, for example, breaking in on our pleasant, regular jog-trot trip to keep the great mills of northern Italy going. Yes, I believed him in spite of my prejudice, and I showed it by taking my leave with a certain degree of haste and starting for the ship. We always do that. It is our idea of safety—to get back to the ship. Habit and duty constrain us. But I had to be shown the way. It was a dark, moonless night and I had very little notion how to proceed. We bade Captain Macedoine good-night and he immediately assumed the manner of an aged ecclesiastic. He became much older. I don't know whether you will get just what I mean, but the mere fact that he was holding the centre of the stage, that we were all looking at him and listening to him and thinking about him, had seemed to inform him with an actual access of vitality. But when I started from my motionless pose in the background and scraped my chair and muttered something about having to get back to the ship, he seemed to fade. He looked at me for an instant in an attentive and perplexed fashion, as though he could hardly account for my presence.
"'I never cared for the sea,' he murmured. 'A preposterous life. All the disadvantages of being in jail with—what was it? Something or other ... I forget ... well, you must come again. Always pleased, you know....'
"And then, outside, Mrs. Sarafov insisted that I would lose my way. Pollyni must go with me and show me a short route to a landing-stage where I could get a boat. We stood in the clear darkness of the high, narrow sidewalk, and I could feel the girl move closer to me as she lifted her chin and smiled into my eyes. What? Lyrical? Well, I can tell you that you would have been lyrical, too, doctor. I was thirty-five, you know, and I had never been in close contact with beautiful women before. Just as Artemisia had her own secret lure, a lure founded on her exquisite, derisive humour and her sombre heritage, so this extraordinarily seductive and friendly young person, an entrancing character composed of Eastern mystery and Western frankness, appealed irresistibly to the connoisseur in a man. She was sex, and nothing but sex, yet she maintained without effort the rôle of being merely a dear friend of Captain Macedoine's daughter.