Captain Macedoine's Daughter

by William McFee

"And I also," resumed Mr. Spenlove, after a moment's silence, "formed a resolution, to refrain from any further participation in alien affairs. I found that I lacked courage for that enterprise, too. It is, after all, a dangerous thing to tamper with one's fundamental prejudices. They very often turn out to be the stark and ugly supports of our health and sanity. I resigned, not without a faint but undeniable tremor of relief, the part of a principal in the play. I have harped to you on this point of my relative importance in the story because it was as a mere super that I entered from the wings and it is as a super in the last act that I retire. I think it was the letter and package M. Kinaitsky sent down to the ship which scared me into obscurity. That and the news that the four o'clock express for Constantinople in which he had been travelling had been blown to atoms by the apostles of Liberty and Progress. You can say it completed the cure, if you like. To read that brief note of courteous and regretful reproach was like encountering a polite phantom. After recording his unalterable conviction that only death or a woman could have prevented an Englishman of honour from keeping an appointment, he begged to trespass so far upon my generous impulses as to send me the package, fully addressed to his brother in London. He would esteem it a favour if I would deliver it in person. The sudden alarming turn of events rendered it imperative to despatch these papers by a secure and unsuspected hand. Should nothing happen, it would be a simple matter for him to communicate with his brother when the present troubles were over. Otherwise ... and so on. He would not do more than allude to the question of recompense, which would be on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of the obligation. The Captain, no doubt, would consent to keep the package in his safe during the voyage....

"Well, the Manola had no safe, but Jack had a formidable old cash-box in his room, and it was with the idea of carrying out the behests of one who could no longer enforce them that I carried the big yellow envelope to Jack and told him how I came by it. Even when it was condensed to suit his bluff mentality, it was a long story. I was astonished at the abstraction into which it threw him. On the road he returned to it again and again. His imagination continually played round the history of 'that gel' as he called her. He could not get used to the startling fact that all this had been going on 'under his very nose, by Jingo!' and he hadn't had the slightest suspicion. 'Forgotten all about her, very nearly. And by the Lord, I thought you had, too, Fred.'

"And I should like," said Mr. Spenlove, "to have heard him tell Mrs. Evans. Perhaps, though, it would not have proved so very sensational after all. It is exceedingly difficult to shock a woman who has been married for a number of years. They seem to undergo a process which, without affording them any direct glimpse into the bottomless pit, renders them cognizant of the dark ways of the human soul. Perhaps you don't believe this. Perhaps you think I am only trying to joke at the expense of a married woman I never liked. Well, try it. Take a benign matron of your own family, who has endured the racking strain of years of family life and tell her your own scandalous history, and she will amaze you by her serene acceptance of your infamous proceedings. So perhaps, as I say, I missed nothing very piquant after all. I had to content myself with the eloquent silence of the respectable but single Tonderbeg, moving about in the cabin, his blond head bent in gentle melancholy, his features composed into an expression of respectful forgiveness.

"'But what was your idea, Fred?' says Jack to me on the road home. He wore habitually a mystified air when we were alone together in his cabin. Jack had become settled in life. His movements had grown more deliberate, and his choleric energy had mellowed into an assured demeanour of authority. You could imagine him the father of a young lady. He sat back in his big chair, motionless save for the cigar turning between thumb and finger, a typical ship-master. He was recognized by the law as competent to perform the functions of a magistrate on the high seas. He no longer plunged like an angry bull into rows with agents. He had arrived at that period of life when all the half-forgotten experiences of our youth, the foolish experiments, the humiliating reverses, come back to our chastened minds and assist us to impose our personalities upon a world ignorant of our former imperfections. And he sat there turning his cigar between thumb and finger, his bright and blood-shot brown eyes fixed in a sort of affectionate glare upon me, his old chum, who had suddenly left him spiritually in the lurch, so to speak. 'What was your idea, Fred? Do you mean to say you hadn't made any plans for the future at all? Just going to let the thing slide?' And the curious thing about his state of mind was that he was attracted by the idea without understanding it. As he sat watching me, mumbling about the future, and the taking of risks and what people at home would say, it was obvious that he was beginning to see the possibilities of such an adventure. He had a vague and nebulous glimpse of something that was neither furtive sensuality nor smug respectability. 'Like something in one of these here novels,' as he put it with unconscious pathos. And that, I suppose, was as near as he ever attained to an understanding of the romantic temperament. It was fine of him, for he got it through a very real friendship. 'I know you wouldn't do anything in the common way, Fred,' he observed after a long contemplation of his cigar.

"'And would you have stood for it, Jack?' I asked him, 'seeing that Mrs. Evans would hardly have approved, I mean.' He roused up and worked his shoulders suddenly in a curious way, as though shifting a burden.

"'Oh, as to that!' he broke out, and then after a pause he added, 'You can't always go by that. I'd stand for a whole lot from you, Fred.'

"And with that, to the regret of Mr. Tonderbeg who was hovering about outside in the main cabin, our conversation ended.

"We bunkered in Algiers and the newspapers gave us the news of the war. A war so insignificant that most of you young fellows have forgotten all about it. And the captain of a ship in the harbour, hearing we were from Saloniki, came over and informed us that he himself had been bound for that port, with a cargo of stores, but had received word to stop and wait for further orders. He was very indignant, for he had expected some pretty handsome pickings. The point of his story was that the stuff was for Macedoine & Co. who would be able to claim a stiff sum in compensation for non-delivery. I believe the case ran on for years in the courts, and the lawyers did very well out of it.

"And when we reached Glasgow, I took the train to London to deliver the package M. Kinaitsky had entrusted to me. I was curious to learn something of that gentleman's affiliations in England, to discover, if you like, how his rather disconcerting mentality comported itself in a Western environment. The envelope was addressed to Rosemary Lodge, Hampstead, and I left Mason's Hotel in the Strand, on a beautiful day in late autumn, and took the Hamstead bus in Trafalgar Square. It was very impressive, that ascent of the Northern Heights of London, dragging through the submerged squalor of Camden Town, up through the dingy penury of Haverstock Hill, to the clear and cultured prosperity of the smuggest suburb on earth. I happened to know Hampstead since I had once met an artist who lived there, though his studio was in Chelsea. I may tell you about him some day. And when I had walked up the Parliament Hill Road and started across the Heath to find Rosemary Lodge, I had a fairly clear notion of what I should find. For of course it was only a lodge in the peculiar modern English sense. It is part of the harmless hypocrisy of this modern use of language, that one should live in tiny flats in London and call them 'mansions' while a large house standing in its own grounds is styled a lodge. M. Nicholas Kinaitsky evidently kept up an extensive establishment. There seemed a round dozen of servants. Two men and a boy were out in the grounds preparing the roses for the winter. A blue spiral of smoke was blowing away from the chimney of the hothouse against the north wall. And the house itself was one of those spacious and perfectly decorous affairs which have become identified with that extraordinary colony of wealthy aliens who make a specialty of being more English than the English. There was a tennis-court on one side of the house and a young man with a dark, clean-shaven face stood talking to a girl, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched in what one may call the public-school manner, the coat of arms of an ancient Oxford college glowing on the breast of his blue blazer. And indoors the same influence obtained. The pictures and books and furniture presented a front of impregnable insularity. Even the piano was English. Only a photograph in a frame of silver gilt, on a side table, gave a hint—the portrait of a lady with hair dressed in the style of German princesses of Queen Victoria's day, the sinuous curve of her high, tight bodice accented by the great bustle. I noted all this, and sat looking out of the window, which gave upon the autumn splendour of the Heath. There was a pond close by, and an old gentleman in white spats was stooping down to launch a large model yacht on the water. A fairly well-to-do old gentleman, by the gold coins on his watch-chain and the rings which sparkled on his hands. I wondered if he were a relative of the Kinaitskys or whether he only knew them. The yacht started off under a press of canvas, and the old gentleman set off at a trot round the edge, to meet it. I doubt if you could have seen a sight like that anywhere else in the world. He was perfectly unconscious of doing anything at all out of the common. And I dare say it is essential to the rounded completeness of English life that funny and wealthy old gentlemen should sail toy yachts on ponds, while cultured aliens amass fortunes on the Stock Exchange and some of us plow the ocean all our lives.

"And then I was disturbed in my musings by a young lady entering the room, and I rose to explain myself.