"'But do you mean to say your father fetched you home to spend your holidays among strangers?' I asked. 'I don't quite understand your father's attitude toward you.'
"'I wish I knew myself,' she muttered, looking at her foot. 'You know,' she went on, 'we have always kept up a sort of arrangement in which he can't live without me and I am a passionately devoted daughter. I wouldn't tell any one else this,' she interpolated hurriedly in a whisper, 'but the fact is, I am not a passionately devoted daughter. I used to think I was. All the girls at school used to rave about their parents, so I raved about mine. Girls are fools,' she remarked, abruptly.
"'In what way—raving?' I asked.
"'Well,' she said, 'they go on and on, meaning no harm, I suppose. You know we used to tell each other we had the most wonderful sweethearts. One girl had a boy in New Zealand. Another was secretly engaged to a man who was in China. All very far away! So I wasn't to be done, and I bragged about a lover in Siberia. When they wanted to know about him I made up a long story. I said he was a Russian and I had met him in London and he'd gone back to Russia and got arrested and sent to Siberia. It was as true as their yarns, I dare say. And it's a fact I used to imagine myself in love with a tall fair man with a yellow beard. There was a Russian at father's house in Pimlico once, but he was an old cuckoo from the Consulate. I didn't like him.'
"'I don't think, my dear,' I said, 'that I want to know any more about it. I believe I understand.'
"'Yes,' she answered. 'I believe you do. I believed you would understand sooner or later, when I sent for you in London. I was a beast, then, but I don't regret it after all. I feel I could be anything to you, and you'd understand. Oh!' she muttered, clinging to me for a moment and staring across to where the sun, already set beyond the purple mountains, sent up broad bars of gold and crimson, reflected in the calm waters of the Gulf. 'Oh! How I have treated you!' and she sank into a silence of passionate regret that lasted until the darkness enfolded us and we had entered the long desolate faubourg."
Mr. Spenlove stopped and rose from his seat on his little camp-stool. Walking to and fro in front of the recumbent forms of his brother officers, his hands in his pockets, his head on his breast, he seemed once again to have forgotten them. And they, perceiving by this time the impropriety of mundane interruptions at such a moment, awaited his resumption in silence.
"After all," he remarked, suddenly stopping and staring down at the deck, "I lost her. I have said to you, at the beginning, that if her story means anything it means that love was nothing, and I had this in mind, for I lost her. And of what avail, I ask you, is an emotion so independent of our individual destinies that it can culminate at the very moment of disaster? It may be, of course, that what we call love is only the bright shadow on earth of some ulterior celestial passion; but life is too short and too unsatisfactory for one to cultivate such an exalted faith. And we crave a little logic of Fate when we suffer. If, for example, the crazy Nikitos, true to his word, had suddenly appeared before us in that narrow street off the Via Egnatia, and destroyed her as many were destroyed that day, one could submit as to a sinister but tangible manifestation of human folly. But to have happened as it did ... there was no sense in it. It was as though that girl, who had been from her birth a waif, the unhappy sport of spurious emotions, had angered Fate by stumbling upon something genuine after all, and was dismissed into the darkness in a moment of irascible petulance. And I suppose that I, if a man had any inherited right to expect that the law of compensation should be put in operation in his favour, should feel a grievance. But as I have remarked more than once, my attempts to be anything more than a super in the play have not been a shining success. So we can leave that out. There is no need to lose faith in Compensation because it is somewhat delayed....
"But even from the standpoint of a detached and isolated event, there was nothing about it that a rational being could lay hold of for comfort. It was just one blind evil chance out of a million possible ones. I did not even see it happen. I was doing something which has no connection with my past or following existence—watching an Ottoman soldier, probably an Anatolian, crumple up and expire in the gutter of the Via Egnatia. I was watching with the close attention one inevitably bestows upon one's first violent death—as a matter of fact, I had never seen any one die, even in bed—and remaining securely wedged in a doorway a few yards up the street. I remember him as he paused for an instant in a sort of ecstasy, his face turned up toward the harsh bright glare of a naked electric bulb that hung from a trolley pole, his body momentarily poised as though defying his destiny. And then he twisted about in an extraordinarily complicated manner and fell, all of a piece, while a number of extremely active persons tore past him without any sound save a popping noise far down the street. That would be near the market, I reflected in my doorway. And as we should have to go that way in order to reach the ship, it struck me that it would be my duty to find another route. And from that I went on to visualize the consternation of my friend Jack, when I turned up with the astonishing entourage of two women and a suitcase, and informed him of my determination. I had a tremendous desire to know, beforehand, just what he would do and say. He would stand by an old friend of course. But how? And while I reflected in my doorway and listened to the popping, which went on with varying intensity, still more figures sped past the end of my street. I recalled the perplexing fact that as we had driven into the town past the barrier, there had been no one on guard. I learned later that, with unbelievable stupidity, the authorities had sent the army out toward Monastir and had left the city with a mere handful of soldiers to deal with the revolutionaries. It was this fact, I suppose, of finding nobody on guard, which had frightened our driver, and no sooner had we alighted before the doorway in that steep, narrow street off the Via Egnatia than he had demanded his fare and galloped away up hill and out of sight. 'You'll have to get another carriage,' Pollyni had told me in an anxious voice. 'You'll find one down near the big church.' The arrangement was that they would be ready by the time I returned.
"But I had got no further than the corner when the first shots had been fired, and while I hesitated, a couple of soldiers had hurried along, looking back at every other stride, until suddenly one of them had been hit. And I had watched him die. I could still see him, an inert heap in the gutter. And while I debated what I was to do to get out of this unforeseen difficulty, the popping became a series of sharp, definite, staccato cracks, and a squad of soldiers, armed with short, blunt rifles, shuffled sideways into view. There was a species of discipline in their movements, for they deployed out over the road and dropped on one knee, while one of them stepped briskly to the curb and spoke in a harsh, authoritative tone to some invisible laggard. He came into view very slowly, dragging one leg, and halted, in the very middle of the street, his rifle pointing up hill, his face turned toward their assailants, his hand to his breast fumbling for cartridges. Now and again he lurched as though wounded, but he never relaxed his defiant glare. His hand worked quickly over the breech and he seemed about to swing his weapon round when he must have been hit again, for he toppled over and the thing went off with a flash and roar."