Читать книгу Captain Macedoine's Daughter - William McFee - Страница 5

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None of the men sitting in deck chairs under the awning were surprised to hear the Chief say that he had known Ipsilon in peace-time. So far H. M. S. Sycorax had touched at no port, and patrolled no sea-route which that quiet and occasionally garrulous man had not known in peace-time. This was not surprising, as we have said, for he alone had been a genuine wanderer upon the face of the waters. The Commander, who lived in majestic seclusion in his own suite, had been all his life in the Pacific trade. The First, Second, and Third Lieutenants came out of western ocean liners. The Surgeon and Paymaster were "temporary" and only waited the last shot to return to the comfortable sinecures, which they averred awaited them in London and Edinburgh. So it happened that to the Chief alone the eastern Mediterranean was a known and experienced cruising ground; and when the Sycorax, detailed to escort convoys through the intricacies of the Ægean Archipelago, awaited her slow-moving charges in the netted and landlocked harbour of Megalovadi, in the Island of Ipsilon, Engineer-Lieutenant Spenlove, R. N. R., said he remembered being there eight or nine years ago, loading for Rotterdam.

The others looked at him and then back at the enormous marble cliffs which threw shadows almost as solid as themselves upon the waters of the little bay, almost a cove. It was not so much that they expected Spenlove to tell them a story as that these men had not yet tired of each other's idiosyncrasies—another way of saying the Sycorax was a happy ship. The infiltration of landsmen, in the persons of surgeon and paymaster, the occasional glimpses of one another caught during their sundry small actions with the enemy, kept their intercourse sweet and devoid of those poisonous growths of boredom and slander which too often accumulate upon a body of men at sea like barnacles on the hull.

And in addition Spenlove was easy to look at, for he never returned the glance. He was a solidly built man of forty odd, with a neat gray beard and carefully tended hair. The surgeon once said Spenlove resembled an ambassador more than an engineer, and Spenlove, without in any way moving from his customary pose of alert yet placid abstraction, had murmured absently:

"On one occasion, I was an ambassador. I will tell you about it some time."

"Rotterdam?" observed Inness the paymaster—Inness was an Oxford man who had married into a wealthy merchant's family. He said "Rotterdam" because he had once been there.

"Yes," said Spenlove. "Rotterdam for Krupp's of Essen. For three years Krupp's took a hundred thousand tons per annum of high-grade ore out of this little island alone. They took it in British bottoms to Rotterdam, and from there it went by way of their interminable canals to Essen. I know because I helped to take it. It was just about the time, too, that Chamberlain was preaching his crusade against the evils of Germany dumping her steel below cost price on our markets, and I was so indignant about it that I wrote to the newspapers. I often wrote to the newspapers in those days. I suppose we all catch the disease at some time or other. As a rule, of course, nothing happened save that the letter would not be printed, or else printed full of mistakes, with the vital paragraphs omitted for 'lack of space.' This letter wasn't printed either, but I received one in return from a fiery young member of Parliament who had just been returned on the Protective Tariff ticket. He asked for full details, which I sent to him. I believe he tried to make a question of it in the House, but he ran up against the Consular Service, and that did for him. You see, our Consul here was named Grünbaum.

"More than that," went on Mr. Spenlove, sitting upright in his deck-chair and looking attentively at a near-by ventilator; "more than that, Mr. Grünbaum was resident concessionaire of the mining company, he owned the pumping-plant which irrigates yonder valley, he was connected by marriage with the Greek governor of the Island, who lives over in the tiny capital of Ipsilon, and he, Grünbaum, was the richest man in the Cyclades. That was his house, that big square white barn with the three tall windows and the outside staircase. He was a man of enormous size and weight, and I daresay the people of the Island thought him a god. He certainly treated them most humanely. Every widow was pensioned by him, which was not very much after all, for they used to have precious little use for money. You could get a bottle of wine and a great basket of grapes and figs for a piece of soap, I remember. He built churches for them, too, like that one perched up there on the rock above his house—snow-white with a blue dome. You may have noticed the other day in the wireless news that the friends of freedom in Greece polished off a few of what were described as reactionaires. Put them up against a wall and pumped mannlicher bullets into them. One of these obstacles to liberty was named Grünbaum, I observed.

"But what I was going to tell you about was a man who was at one time in Grünbaum's employ, a man whom I had run against before, a Captain Macedoine. I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of him. He was a very remarkable man for all that. He wasn't a captain at all, really, you know. As it happens, I knew that much about him a long while back, when I was in the Maracaibo Line, running with mails, passengers, and fruit between Colombian ports and New Orleans. No; they were absorbed long ago. The big Yucatan Steamship Company opened its big jaws one day and gulped down the Maracaibo outfit at one swallow. And we all had to come home. It was a fairly lucrative billet while it lasted, and Macedoine, who was a chief steward, may have put by a good bit of money. He had that reputation, and judging by experience I should say at least half of what we heard was true. But what interested me when I was sailing with him was his character, as revealed by his hobby. For it was a hobby with him and a fairly expensive one, too, posing as an educated man of old family. It was the great preoccupation of his life. You might almost be justified in calling him an artist. He was a big, solemn, clean-shaven person, with an air of haughtiness which impressed passengers tremendously. It was this air which got him the nick-name of captain, and it stuck. Two or three young girls, who were making the trip, came up to him the first day out, and one of them exclaimed, 'Oh, Captain, can we ...' something or other. The skipper was a dried-up little shell-back who hated passengers and never came down on the promenade deck at all. The bell-hop, an immoral little demon in buttons, who had come from a reformatory, heard the remark and in a few minutes it was all over the pantry and glory-hole. 'Captain Macedoine.' When he gave one of the scullions a calling down next day, the man, a typical Louisiana nigger, answered in the inevitable musical drawl: 'All right, sah, Captain Macedoine!' It stuck. It hit the popular fancy. More than that, it hit his own fancy, too, for when he went home to England, 'retired on a competency,' as he phrased it, he retired as Captain Macedoine; late of the American Merchant Marine.

"But that was only a side issue. He let it be known, in the subtlest possible manner, that he was of ancient lineage. He had been heard to speak of Alexander of Macedon! Yes, you laugh; but you have not been to sea as long as I have. Such things are possible at sea. I have had a second engineer from Sunderland, a chap named Philip, who claimed Philip of Spain as his ancestor. There was Captain Gizzard, in my old London employ, who had a genealogical tree which traced the old fraud's descent from the Guiscards of Sicily. No! Captain Macedoine's illusions are common enough, I fancy, among men. It was only that instead of trying to master them and clear them away, he cultivated them until they grew to monstrous proportions and he lost sight of reality altogether. Or if you like, he was an artist, working upon himself as material, like those old masters we read about who devoted their lives to the accomplishment of obscure technical excellences that only the cognoscenti could discover and enjoy."

"Possibly," murmured the Surgeon, smiling in the darkness of the evening.

"Well," said Mr. Spenlove, in a musing tone, "of course a certain latitude of analogy is permitted in describing one man to another, if we ever can describe him. That was how Macedoine struck me. The aim of his art was to conceal the artist, which I understand is sound aesthetics. And it was impossible not to admire his method, his style, if you like. There was nothing crude in it. So far from leaving nothing to chance, he left everything to chance. Take the case of his daughter. The brat in those days was a god-send to him. I used to think she was merely an invention, he was so circumstantial in his subtly shaded allusions. You might say that if she hadn't existed, the trend of his emotional development, the scheme on which he was engaged, would have compelled him to invent her. As I say, I did believe at one time he had invented her, for he was always inventing something. In some bewildering, indefinable way, we became aware, week by week, month by month, of a fresh touch, a new phase of Captain Macedoine. I don't pretend to know what final frame he proposed to give to the magnificent picture he was making. Perhaps he didn't know himself. Perhaps he had no ultimate design. Anyhow we never had it, for as I said, the company was absorbed and we all had to come home.

"I admit I was surprised enough when I found out, quite accidentally, that he had married an octaroon. When I say married, I mean of course, as far as fidelity and maintenance was concerned. He rented a cottage out on Tchoupitoulas Street, where the mosquitoes sing loud enough to drown conversation, and the grass grows man-high between the road and the sidewalk. And there the woman lived a while and died. I was never in the house, but young Strellett, the second steward, who was lost when the Toro turned over in the Yucatan channel, was married and lived not far from Macedoine's ménage, and I can imagine the place. Strellett had a little three-roomed box where he lived with his big rosy-cheeked Irish wife, and there was something very homelike about it, for all the carpets and curtains and a good deal of the table-linen had come from the Maracaibo Line's cabins. Sent ashore to be cleaned, you know, and didn't get back. I dare say Macedoine's place was even more completely furnished at the company's expense. They all did it. Perhaps that was one of the reasons we all had to come home. That was ... yes, more than twenty years ago.

"I'm afraid, though, there were not many of us like Macedoine. We didn't come home to retire on a competency. New Orleans used to be what they called 'a wide-open little town' and there were plenty of ways of getting rid of our wages, good as they were. However, that's a detail. We came home, except one or two youngsters who struck west and got into Nevada mining plants or San Francisco lumber ships. I was glad to come. I had a few shots in the locker and I went down into Hampshire to see my people. I didn't stay as long as I intended. Who of us ever does? After the first glow of welcome dies away, we have to depend on our personal attractions to keep people interested. We may keep the ball rolling a little longer if we get married or even engaged; but it is a sorry business after all. You fellows are for ever wanting the ship to go home. Well, you wait and see. You'll be glad to be back. When a man has got the sea-habit, his relations always regard him as a bit of a nuisance.

"I went to sea again. I joined a London Company which I always call now 'my old company' because I was so long with them, and have for them a peculiar sort of cantankerous affection. They paid infernally poor wages, they were always in a hole financially until the war made them multi-millionaires, and their accommodation was pretty poor. But for some reason or other men stayed with them. I believe it was because we were working for a private firm and not for one of those gigantic corporations without soul to be damned or body to be kicked, as the saying is. The firm were real people to us. They came down to see the ship in London River. Old Gannet—it was Gannet, Prawle and Co.—used to leave a ten-pound note on the Chief's wash-stand after he'd had a yarn and a cigar. Young Gannet, home for the holidays from Winchester College, would come down to St. Katherine's Dock and make himself squiffy with Madeira the skipper had brought home from the Islands. Prawle had been an office boy when old Gannet was young, and had worked up to a partnership and married Daisy Gannet. Smartest man on the Baltic Exchange, they used to say. Yes, their ships were fierce, but men stayed in them. Even now, with old Gannet dead and Prawle retired, and the management paying poor whiskey-soaked young Gannet three thousand a year to keep out of the office, the old skippers and chiefs are still ploughing the ocean for them. You see, we know their ways.

"I went to sea, and kept on at it. You might say it was force of habit, for I must admit I could have had jobs ashore in those days. Not now. But then I could. But it grows on one, going to sea. And I was making friends. There's nothing like a ship-mate who is a friend. The mere fact of you or him joining another ship and sailing away is nothing. When you meet again you take up the tale where you dropped it, years before, half the world away. But you must be young. It is impossible to weld friendships when the heat of youth has gone out. Interests, family ties, danger, sorrow, all may do something, but only when you are young can you make the friendships that nothing can destroy."

Mr. Spenlove paused, and for a moment there was no sound save the purr of the dynamos under their feet, the soft swish and suck of the waves flowing in and out of the under-cut marble cliffs, and the steady tramp of the Quartermaster patrolling to and fro at the gangway. One of the noticeable points about Spenlove was that he fitted into no standard gauge. Neither the Surgeon nor the Oxonian could "place" him precisely, they would confess. Nor could the more experienced lieutenants, highly certificated gentlemen from the Liverpool to New York Ferry steamers. With unconscious humour they "wondered such a man should go to sea." The notion that the sea should be peopled exclusively with moral and intellectual derelicts dies hard. The fact was, Mr. Spenlove was a connoisseur of humanity. He seemed to have met so many types that he unconsciously addressed himself to the fundamentals. He took the inevitable superficial features of one's character for granted. This made him easy to accept but difficult to understand. And so, when he spoke of friendship and youth, the other men did not laugh. They were silent—some with assent, some with doubt, and some, possibly, with regret.

"I was second of one of their oldest boats for two years and Jack Evans was mate. Jack and I became friends. I don't mean that the Mate and the Second of that old ship went about with their arms wound round each other's necks. We were, on the contrary, very often at each other's throats, so to speak. Mates and second-engineers are professionally antagonistic. We had terrific altercations over stores, for the company patronized one of those old-fashioned ship chandlers who sent cabin, deck, and engine stores all in one chaotic heap. Jack would get my varnish and I would snaffle a couple of bolts of his canvas. But that would all blow away by tea time, when we'd go ashore and spend the evening together. Mind you, we were neither of us very good young men. We ... well, we had some good times and some bad ones. We were shifted together into another ship. Then Jack, who'd been nine solid years mate in the company and was getting so angry about it that the port-captain used to avoid him, Jack got a command. I shall never forget it. We were lying as peaceably as you please in the top corner of the old Queens Dock, Glasgow. It was Saturday night and all was snug for a quiet week-end. Jack and I were in his room under the bridge having a nip, when a telegraph-boy came clattering down the brass-edged staircase. Jack opened the wire, read it, and then gave me a thump on the back that nearly broke it. He was a stout, florid-faced, peppery little Welshman. What I liked about him was his crystal-clear character. What he thought came out like a shell out of a gun—with an explosion. 'The old thief's given me a ship at last!' he roared. And he had to pack and get away that night to Bristol. I went for a cab while he got his dunnage together. And I remember now, waiting on the platform at the Union Station for the train to move, with Jack in a corner of the compartment drunk as a lord, and snoring.

"It was in London I met him again. We had had a collision and I was one of the witnesses called by the company to swear our ship was innocent. She wasn't: she wasn't: she did everything she shouldn't have done—but no matter. We all stayed at a little hotel in the Strand, getting a guinea a day expenses, and we all swore black was white, and the owners, our owners, lost the case. They had already lost the ship, so we were told to go home and wait a few weeks until they could get hold of another one cheap. Of course most of the crowd joined other companies, but I went off to Waterloo to inflict myself on my people in Hampshire again. And it was at the bookstall that I saw Jack staring at the illustrated papers and jangling the money in his pockets. He was in a very shabby condition, I may tell you. His chin was a rich growth of black stubble, his round protuberant brown eyes were blood-shot, and his clothes had been slept in, I'm sure. 'Thank God it's you, Fred,' he splutters out, for he jumped like a cat when I touched him. We went into the bar and he told me how he had fallen on such evil days. His ship had been away nearly a year on the west coast of South America. He hadn't spent a pound in the whole trip. No going ashore, nobody to speak to, nothing. And here he'd come into London River and paid off. It was easy to see what had happened. A young hot-blooded man with three or four hundred pounds in his pocket, and no decent friends in town. His contempt for himself was rather amusing. 'Take me away, Fred,' he implored. 'Take me somewhere where I shan't be tempted.'

"'The fact is,' I said, as we made for the barber shop, 'you ought to get married, Jack.'

"'Who'd have a drunken old swab like me?' he inquired, sadly. 'You know I've been brought up common.'

"He was very contrite, but eventually, when he had got himself spruced up, changed his clothes and fetched his dunnage out of the terrible little hotel near Waterloo station where he had been lured, he began to take a less austere view of himself. He was determined, however, never to wallow in the mire again. He was a ship-master. His plump, rosy face grew pale and drawn at the possibilities which he had risked. He was a typical British sailor man. Riotous living was really distasteful to him, but he had no idea of getting rid of his money in any other way. However, I missed that train and took him down with me to Hampshire next day. It was one of the great deeds of my career. He fell in love the very first week."

"But what has all this to do with Captain Macedoine and this Island of Ipsilon?" enquired the small, precise voice of the Paymaster.

For a moment there was no reply. It was very dark under the awning now, for the moon was still behind the cliffs. Four bells rang at the gangway. Mr. Spenlove lit a cigarette and continued.

"Have you ever seen a sea-captain in the throes of adoration? It is an astonishing sight. Jack was what he himself called 'open as the day.' Mind you, I had no ulterior motive in taking my old friend down home with me. I had no plain sisters or cousins to get settled in life. Both plain and pretty in our family were married and gone when we arrived. We lived, you know, just outside Threxford, a small town six miles from a railway, tucked away in the valley of the Threxe, about ten miles from where that small stream falls into the Channel. It was a lovely spot, but so dreadfully quiet I could never live there very long. Over the town hung a high hill crowned by the workhouse. You see, it was the workhouse master's daughter Jack had fallen in love with."

"Captain Macedoine's daughter?" suggested the Paymaster.

"No, a very different person, I assure you. Madeline Hanson had been brought up in a very secluded way. It couldn't have been otherwise. Old Hanson occupied a somewhat dubious position in the social life of England. A workhouse master is not the sort of man either rich or poor want to have much to do with. He is like the hangman or jailer or rag-and-bone man; a necessary evil. But he may be, as Hanson was, a most respectable person. And Madeline, his only child, was brought up in almost solitary confinement until she was twenty. I believe she went to an aunt in Portsmouth occasionally. Anyhow it suited her. She was a puny, flat-chested little girl, very prim and precise, and would bridle at once when any one laughed or made a joke. I never discovered exactly how Jack got acquainted with her. At church most likely, for he was in full cry after respectability and went to church regularly with my old people. I know we used to go fishing together at first, and later I found myself going alone, for Jack was meeting his inamorata, and going for walks. Oh, quite above board. Jack was 'open as the day.' He lost no time in marching up the hill to the workhouse (not the first time he'd been inside one, he assured me grimly) and informing Mr. Hanson that Captain Evans wished to pay attention to Miss Hanson. Whether old Hanson was a man of the world or not, I cannot say, but he certainly knew his daughter might go a long way farther and fare worse. Jack's affair prospered. I have often been curious to know just what they said to each other as they prowled about the lanes in the dark. I suppose it was a case of the attraction of opposites. For once, anyhow, in spite of novelists, the course of true love ran smooth.

"Of course Jack had his fits of jealousy. You see, he couldn't understand how in the world he had managed to pick such a prize without having to shoot up the whole town. He even suspected me of having designs on his happiness, and I suddenly realized the tremendous difficulty of reassuring him. You know, it's a delicate business, disclaiming all desire for a woman. If you overdo it, you rouse suspicion at once. When I said, 'Oh, no, I don't want to....' Jack was up and prancing about the room. 'Why, do you know anything?' he demanded. I soothed him, telling him he knew I wasn't a marrying man. 'That be d—d for a tale. I wasn't either till I met Madeline.' I had a stormy time. The contrast between Jack's volcanic temperament and the calm, meticulous flow of his courtship was comic. I was thankful when he was finally married and gone to Ilfrocombe for his highly respectable honeymoon. And then, a fortnight later, I got a telegram ordering me to join his ship, the Manola, at Newcastle, as chief. We were shipmates once more.

"There now began for me an existence which is rather difficult to describe. In cargo-boats, as no doubt you know, the skipper and chief can easily be thrown together a good deal. Jack and I of course were. But Jack was under the impression that I existed for the sole purpose of listening to his rapturous idolizing of his darling wife. He wrote to her every day, and read the letter to me afterward. She wrote to him every day, and when we reached port and the mail came aboard, Jack would read the gist of it to me. It was like being married oneself. He would lie back in his deck chair on the bridge on fine evenings in the Mediterranean and suck at his cigar, sunk in thought. And then suddenly he would bring out some profoundly novel and original remark about Madeline. I had Madeline for breakfast, dinner, supper, and between meals. It was trying, but it was nothing compared with the frightful time I put in with him the voyage the baby was born. We were in Genoa, and he wired home every day. I would march him up town in the evening and stand him drinks, which he swallowed without looking at them. And it never entered his head that it was possibly less important to me than to him. When a telegram came, 'Daughter, both doing well,' he ordered grog for all hands, took me up town, and stood champagne to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the Verdi Bar. I got him down to the harbour in a carriage and he wanted to fight me because I laughed when he told the driver that he was going to call the baby Angelina Madeline Evans.

"He did, too. Life for me became impregnated with Madeline and Angelina as with a domestic odour. That marvellous child haunted my hours of leisure long before I had ever seen her. As the months and years passed, and Jack and I fared up and down the world together, I sometimes wondered whether we hadn't both married Madeline. Jack was a model husband. The notion that any other woman existed, or that any other man could love a woman as he loved Madeline, never entered his head. He was perfectly satisfied as long as one sat and listened to him talking about Madeline. I believe he would have urged me to go and do likewise, if he hadn't been convinced that no more Madelines were available. I believe, too, he thought me a bit of an ass to take him down and introduce him instead of marrying her myself. But as you will see, she and I were not affinities.

"So life went on, and now I am coming to the time when Captain Macedoine's daughter comes into the thing. Oh, no, I haven't forgotten what I was talking about. Time passed, and one voyage we left home with Jack in an anxious frame of mind. The child was about five years old then and she was sick. Something the matter with her throat. Jack was like a caged bear when we got to sea. There was no wireless then, you know. You would have thought there had never been a sick child on earth before. 'Fred,' he would say, 'I left orders—get the best advice, best of everything. I don't give a damn what it costs,' And he'd prance to and fro. He never looked at the ship. If we dropped a knot below our customary two hundred a day, he'd be in my room growling, 'Aren't we ever goin' to get to Alexandria, Fred?' When we did get there he fled up to the post office to get his mail—forgot all about ours of course. 'Not yet out of danger—diphtheria,' so ran the telegram in reply to his own frantic message. I never had such a time in my life. He was like a man demented. He would catch me by the shoulder and coat-collar and glare at me out of his bulging, blood-shot brown eyes, his fat cheeks all drawn into pouches, and stutter, 'Fred, this is the end o' me. If I lose one I lose both. My God, I've a good mind to go home. I tell you I'm going off my head. If I lose one I lose both. Madeline'll never live through the loss o' the child. What shall I do, oh, what shall I do?' I believe he used to go into his cabin, shut the door, and pester the Almighty with his petitions. You know, they say domestic ties strengthen a man's personality, stimulate him to ambition. I have not noticed it. On the contrary, it has often seemed to me that married men adopt the ethics of the jungle. Life for them is a case of the man and his mate against the world. The jungle reverberates with their cries of rage, jealousy, and amorous delight. What are literature and drama but the coördination of these elevated cat-calls?"

"Oh, come!" murmured the Surgeon.

"Well, isn't it?" demanded Mr. Spenlove. "What made this war so popular? Wasn't it simply because it supplied men who had been surfeited with love, with an almost forgotten inspiration? Hadn't we been bred for a generation on Love, beautiful Love, which laughed at locksmiths and made the world go round? And here came Hate to have a turn! I tell you, something had to happen or we should all have gone crazy. Captain Evans, with his exalted notions of domestic affection, was our ideal. We were becoming monsters of marital egotism. You remember that song on the halls: