"I'm going on a local ship down to the Islands," he replied.
"Not the Kalkis?"
Mr. Spokesly nodded, and said he was going mate.
"Well, look here. I'm Officer of Supply, you know. You might look me up—you know where it is—and we'll have a word about the cargo. Yes, in the morning."
The major and his friend the censor, who was also a novelist, gazed after Mr. Spokesly as he went out.
"I believe that fellow Dainopoulos is on the level after all," said the major, drawing hard at his cigarette. "I know his skipper is a Britisher, and this chap's all right, I should say. Well, he's making enough out of it to give us a fair deal."
"Most of these local people are on our side, I think," said the other.
"If we pay them more than the other side," added the major drily. And then they went up to get ready for their dinner.
Mr. Spokesly called a carriage and started along the quai. He wondered what they wanted of him about the cargo! Was it possible Captain Rannie was not regarded with complete confidence at headquarters? He recalled the extraordinary reception the Captain had given to his owner when Mr. Dainopoulos described the undeviating rectitude of his course. Mr. Spokesly was not simple enough to suppose that the Kalkis was as innocent as she looked in the distance. He knew that the delicate and precarious position of the Allies in Saloniki rendered it necessary to wink at a good deal of adventurous trading in which the local Levantine merchants were past-masters. It could not be helped. But he was puzzled to account for Captain Rannie. How had he come to be in the employ of Mr. Dainopoulos? And what was the lure which held him to a sort of snarling fidelity? Perhaps he also had a tremendous love affair, like Jack Harrowby. Mr. Dainopoulos had hinted at shabby intrigues. Even Mr. Dainopoulos, however, was not quite on safe ground here. Captain Rannie had his own way of enjoying himself, and an essential part of that enjoyment was its secrecy. He couldn't bear anybody to know anything about him. He was averse, in fact, to admitting that he ever did enjoy himself. It was too much like letting his opponents score against him. And so people like Mr. Dainopoulos, familiar with evil, imagined the captain to be much more wicked than he ever ventured to be. The drug whose aid he invoked made him look not only aged but sinful as a compensation for the glimpses into the paradise of perpetual youth which it afforded him while he was lying amid huge puffy pillows, in a house near the Bazaar. It gave him genuine pleasure to escape every familiar human eye, and arrive by devious ways at a secret door in a foul alley, which gave on to the back of the house where a quiet, elderly woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter received him and wafted him gently away into elysium. He was a sensualist no doubt, yet it would puzzle a jury of angels to find him more guilty than many men of more amiable repute. When he sank into one of his torpors, the quiet woman holding his pulse, he felt he was getting even with the wife and daughter who had made him so unhappy in past days. Captain Rannie never did anything without what he called "full warrant." He considered he had full warrant for killing himself with drugs if he wished. He merely refrained out of consideration for the world. Away back in the womb of Time, some forgotten but eternal principle of justice had decreed to him the right to do as he pleased, provided, always provided, he did his duty in his public station. This is a common enough doctrine in Europe and a difficult one to abrogate. Mr. Spokesly, driving along the quai toward the White Tower, would have been the last to deny what Captain Rannie called "a common elementary right." He was invoking it himself. What he was trying to do all this while was to achieve an outlet for his own personality. This was really behind even his intrigue with the London School of Mnemonics. He was convinced he had something in him which the pressures and conventions of the world had never permitted to emerge. It must be borne in mind that the grand ideal of sacrifice which swept over us like a giant wave of emotion at the beginning of the war behaved like all waves. It receded eventually, and those of us whose natures were durable rather than soluble emerged and began to take in the situation while we dried ourselves as quickly as possible. We wondered if there might not be some valuable wreckage washing ashore soon. We got into the universal life-saving uniform, of course, and assumed conventional attitudes of looking out to sea and acting as chorus to the grand principal performers; but the habits and instincts of generations were too strong for us. We kept one eye on the beaches for wreckage. Patriotism became an intricate game of bluffing ourselves. We had returned with naïve simplicity to the habits of our Danish and Saxon and Norman ancestors. Like the Jews in London who joined lustily in the chorus of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," we missed the joke in our furious eagerness to seize the opportunity. But there were many, and Mr. Spokesly was one, whose acquisitive genius was not adequately developed to deal with all the chances of loot that came by, and who were preoccupied with the fascinating problem of establishing their egos on a higher plane. Merely becoming engaged had been an advance, for Mr. Spokesly, because men like him can move neither upward nor downward without the aid of women. Once removed from the influence of Ada by a series of events which he could not control, he was the predestined prey of the next woman ahead. Those who view this career with contempt should reflect upon the happiness and longevity of many who pursue it. Mr. Spokesly was no sensualist in the strict meaning of the word. He simply experienced a difficulty in having any spiritual life apart from women. He could do with a minimum of inspiration, but such as he needed had to come from them. All his thoughts clustered about them. Just as he experienced a feeling of exaltation when he found himself in their company, so he could never see another man similarly engaged without regarding him as a being of singular fortune. Always, moreover, he conceived the woman he did not know as a creature of extraordinary gifts. Evanthia Solaris seemed to have eluded classification because, without possessing any gifts at all beyond a certain magnetism bewilderingly composed of feminine timidity and tigerish courage, she had inspired in him a strange belief that she would bring him good fortune. This was the kind of woman she was. She went much farther back into the history of the world than Ada Rivers. Ada was simply a modern authorized version of Lady Rowena or Rebecca of York. She accepted man, though what she really wanted was a knight. Evanthia had no use for knights, save perhaps those of Aristophanes. She, too, accepted men; but they had to transform themselves quickly and efficiently into the votaries of a magnetic goddess. Sighs and vows of allegiance were as nothing at all to her. She had a divinely dynamic energy which set men going the way she wanted. The gay young devil who had been sent packing with the consuls and who was now sitting in his hotel in Pera was wondering at his luck in escaping from her and scheming how to get back to her at the same time. Yet so astute had she been that even now he did not suspect that she was scheming, too, that she was in an agony at times for the loss of him, and talked to Mrs. Dainopoulos of killing herself. She was scheming as she came walking among the grass-plats at the base of the Tower and saw Mr. Spokesly descend from a carriage and take a seat facing the sea. She came along, as she so often did in her later period, at a vital moment. She came, in her suit of pale saffron with the great crown of black straw withdrawing her face into a magically distant gloom, and holding a delicate little wrap on her arm against the night, for the sun was going down behind the distant hills and touching the waters of the Gulf with ruddy fire. She saw him sitting there, and smiled. He was watching a ship going out, a ship making for the narrow strait between the headland and the marshes of the Vardar, and thinking of his life as it was opening before him. He took out a cigarette and his fingers searched a vest-pocket for matches. They closed on the emerald ring and he held the cigarette for a while unlit, thinking of Evanthia, and wondered how he could make the gift. And as he sat there she seemed to materialize out of the shimmering radiance of the evening air, prinking and bending forward with an enchanting smile to catch his eye. And before he could draw a breath, sat down beside him.
"What you do here?" she asked in her sweet, twittering voice. "You wait for somebody, eh?"