Command

by William McFee

There seemed to be no one on board. And it suddenly occurred to him that this might be an actual fact. He looked into the galley and found no one there. He walked forward to the bridge-deck rail and blew his whistle. Presently up from below, and framed in the doorway of the scuttle, appeared an alarming phenomenon. Its hair stood in conflicting directions, a large moustache cut across between two round black eyes and a red mouth full of yellow teeth, one cheek was covered thickly with lather, and the other, already shaved, was smeared with blood.

"What's the matter?" said the bosun.

"Where's the watchman?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

"He's down here talking to me."

"What are you doing, shaving?"

"Of course I am. What did you think I was doing? Cutting my throat?"

"Looks damn like it," muttered Mr. Spokesly, and sauntered away aft to look at the shore. The indignant apparition in the forecastle scuttle gradually sank from view like the phantoms in old-fashioned grand opera, and was replaced by a lumbering creature in a blue jersey, with curling blond hair, and carrying a bucket of soap-suds. Mr. Spokesly heard him, presently, banging about in the galley.

There was a seat aft near the hand-steering gear, one of those old-fashioned affairs with curiously moulded cast-iron ends and elaborate teak slats, and he sat down there with the telescope to his eye watching the dark mass of trees and roofs where Mr. Dainopoulos lived. Except for a street lamp shining among the trees and an occasional blue spit from a trolley-car, he could discern nothing. Even the room where Mrs. Dainopoulos usually lay was not lighted. It was just about this time that Mr. Spokesly reached the lowest point of his confidence. The magnetism of Evanthia's personality, a magnetism which made him feel, in her presence, that she was capable of achieving anything she desired, and which is sometimes confused with the faculty of command, was wearing away in the chill, dark emptiness of the night. There was a quality of sharp and impersonal skepticism in the air and in those glittering shore-lights beyond the black and polished surface of the Gulf. There was now no wind; the evening current and breeze had faded away, and both the water and the air were hanging motionless until the early morning, when they would set eastward again, to bring the ships' bows pointing towards the shore. And it was slack water in the minds of men floating on that dark and sinister harbour. There were other men sitting and looking towards the shore, men whose nerves had been worn raw by the sheer immensity of the mechanism in which they were entangled. They were the last unconsidered acolytes in a hierarchy of hopeless men. They had no news to cheer them, for the ships sank a thousand miles away. They endured because they were men, and the noisy lies that came to them over the aërials only made them look sour. Great journalists in London, their eyes almost popping from their heads at the state of things on the sea and at the Front, thumped the merchant mariner on the back in bluff and hearty editorials, calling him a glorious shell-back and earning his silent contempt. The stark emphasis placed upon his illiteracy and uncouthness did more harm than good. The great journalists accepted the Navy and the Army on equal footing, but they felt it necessary to placate the seaman with patronage. They were too indolent to find out what manner of men they were who were going to sea. And while the politicians fumbled, and the Navy and Army squabbled with each other and with their allies, and the organized sentiment of the world grew hysterical about Tommy and Jack, the seaman went on being blown up at sea or rotting at anchor. And of the two the former was invariably preferred. Mr. Spokesly, setting down the telescope to light another cigarette, was following this train of thought, and he was surprised to come on the conviction that an active enemy who tries to kill you can be more welcome and estimable than a government without either heart or brains who leaves you to sink in despair. Indeed, he began to carry on a little train of thought of his own, this habit having had more chance to grow since the London School of Mnemonics had gone to the bottom with the Tanganyika and a good many other things. He said to himself: that's it. It isn't the work or the danger, it's the monotony and feeling nobody gives a damn. Look at me. Now I'm on my own, so to speak, gone out and started something myself, I feel twice as chipper as I did when I was on that darned Tanganyika and they didn't seem to know where to send her or what to do with her when she got there. I wonder how many ships we got, sailing about like her, and gettin' sunk, and nobody any better off. They say there's ships carryin' sand to Egypt and lumber to Russia. That's where it is. You trust a man to boss the job and he can make a million for himself if he likes; you don't mind. But if he muffs it, you want to kill him even if he is a lord or a politician. I must say we got a bunch of beauties on the job now. Good Lord!

It might be imagined that having found so fertile and refreshing a theme, Mr. Spokesly would have abandoned everything else to pursue it to the exceedingly bitter end. But he no longer felt that cankering animosity towards authority. He saw that authority can be made exceedingly profitable to those who display dexterity and resilience in dealing with it. Mr. Spokesly had associated long enough with Mr. Dainopoulos, for example, to conceive a genuine admiration for that gentleman's astute use of his position in the midst of diverse and conflicting authorities. Mr. Dainopoulos might be said to be loaning the Government the tackle to pull down the branches laden with fruit, and then charging a high price for the privilege of putting that fruit into his own pocket. Even the shipowners of England could teach him nothing about profits. Indeed, later on, when the war was over, and he himself was expeditiously disposing of his interests in ships, for he had known wars before and the slumps that followed them, it was to those same shipowners that he sold some of his most deplorable wrecks at the top of the market, rather mystified at their blind eagerness to close with him at any price. He was heard to say, on the Bourse at Alexandria, on that always cool loggia where so many deals are consummated over coffee and granita, "This will not last. You take my advice. Sell that ship of yours to the English." And his dark-skinned companion, who had been doing very well in the tobacco trade from the Piræus and Saloniki, would very likely sell, at a price that made him wonder if the English had discovered a river of money somewhere. And both of them would continue to sit there, fezzed and frock-coated, playing with their rosaries, and discussing cautiously the outlook for Nilotic securities in the event of the English withdrawing....

But that came later. Mr. Spokesly would have been even more impressed if he had been aware of the ultimate destination of the freight he had been stowing so industriously into the Kalkis, or of the total emoluments accruing to Mr. Dainopoulos from that freight from first to last. The old adage about turning your money over was not often so admirably illustrated. Archy's absurd speculations and traffic in villainous drugs seemed microscopic compared with the profits to be made by a good business man. Which is perhaps one of the most embarrassing criticisms of war in the modern sense, that it places a formidable premium upon the sutlers and usurers, so that they now sit in high places, while the youths of invincible courage are either rotting under wooden crosses in France or looking for shabby situations across the sea. But Mr. Spokesly, sitting there with his telescope, which revealed nothing, was not criticizing the business men. He was admiring them, and wishing the military and political and naval men could be half as clever at their game as the business man was at his. It was a confusing and kaleidoscopic problem, this of money. As soon as you got a lot of it, he reflected, the value of it went down until you had only a little and then the value of it went a little lower. And then, when you were occupied in some way which prevented your making very much, the value crept slowly up again. That is, unless you were a business man, when of course you turned your money over and scored both ways.