Knights and Turcopoliers

I

HE came out of the Strada Mezzodi running, shoulders back, gloves and cane held bosom-high in his clenched lists, like an athlete’s corks, the whole body of the man pulsing and glowing from the ascent of that precipitous slot. Came out into the Strada Reale, and brought up against me with a squashing thump that left us limp and uncertain of the future.

He took off his cap and mopped his swiftly sloping forehead with the heel of his hand — an original and unforgettable gesture. There he was, unchanged and unchangeable, a knotty sliver of England, exactly the same, save for the Naval Reserve uniform, as when, some nine years before, I had seen him barging his way into the shipping office in North Shields, to sign off articles, for he was going away home to Newcastle, to get married.

There he was, ready-witted as ever, for he demanded with incredible rapidity of utterance what the h—I

thought I was doing, and recognized me even as he asked. He was, for all his doeskin uniform and characteristically shabby lace and gloves, the same scornful, black-browed, hook-nosed truculent personality. Small, yet filling the picture like bigger men by reason of his plunging restlessness, his disconcerting circumlocution of body, he vibrated before me, even now, an incarnate figure of interrogation. He found breath and voice, and shook my hand in a limp, lifeless fashion that conveyed an uncanny impression of its being his first timorous experiment in handshaking— another peculiar and paradoxical by-product of his personality.

He turned me round and propelled me back along the Strada Reale. He said the man I wanted to see at the Base Office was away playing polo, and I could see him in the morning. He asked where my baggage was; and when I told him, he said the Regina was the worst hotel in town and there was a room vacant next to his in the Angleterre. He turned me suddenly into the entrance hall of a vast structure of stone, where in the cool darkness diminished humans sat in tiny chairs and read the news-telegrams at microscopic notice-boards. An ornate inscription informed me that this place had been the auberge of the Knights of the Tongue of Provence; but he said it was the Union Club. He examined a row of pigeonholes and took out some letters.

We sallied forth into the afternoon sunlight again, and he hurried me along toward the Piazza de San Giorgio. A captain and two commanders passed, and I saluted, but my companion spun round a corner into the declivity called the Strada San Lucia, and muttered that his salutes were all over and done with. Scandalized, yet suspecting in my unregenerate heart that here lay a tale that: might be told in the twilight, I made no reply. Another turn into the fitly named Strada Stretta, no more than a congregation of stone staircases largely monopolized by goats with colossal udders and jingling bells, and we hurtled into the archway of an enormous mediæval building whose iron gate shut upon us with a clang like a new-oiled postern.

And as we ascended the winding stone stairs there came down to us a medley of persons and impressions. There were far gongs and musical cries pierced by a thin continuous whine. There was a piratical creature, with fierce eyes and an alarming shock of upstanding black hair, who wielded a mop and stared with voracious curiosity. There came bounding down upon us a boy of eleven or so, with brown hair, a freckled nose, and beautiful gray eyes. There descended a buxom woman of thirty, modest and capable to the eye, yet with a sort of tarnish of sorrowful experience in her demeanor. And behind her, walking abreast and in step, three astounding apparitions,— Russian guardsmen, — in complete regalia, blue and purple and bright gold, so fabulous that one stumbled and grew afraid. Mincingly they descended, in step, their close-shaven polls glistening, their small eyes and thin long legs giving them the air of something dreamed, bizarre adumbrations of an order gone down in ruin and secret butchery to a strangled silence.

A high, deep, narrow gothic doorway on a landing stood open, and we edged through.

I had many questions to ask. I was reasonably entitled to know, for example, the charges for these baronial halls and gigantic refectories. I had a legitimate curiosity concerning the superb beings who dwelt, no doubt, in mediæval throne-rooms in distant wings of the château. And above all I was wishful to learn the recent history of Mr. Eustace Heatly, sometime second engineer of the old S.S. Dolores, late engineer lieutenant, and now before my eyes tearing off his coat and vest and pants, and bent double over a long black coffin-like steel chest, whence he drew a suit of undeniable tweeds. But it was only when he had abolished the last remaining trace of naval garniture by substituting a cerise poplin cravat for the black affair worn in memory of the late Lord Nelson, and a pair of brown brogues for the puritanical messboots of recent years, that Heatly turned to where I sat on the bed and looked searchingly at me from under his higharched, semi-circular black eyebrows.

He was extraordinarily unlike a naval officer now. Indeed, he was unlike the accepted Englishman. He had one of those perplexing personalities that are as indigenous to England as the Pennine Range and the Yorkshire Wolds, as authentic as Stonehenge; yet, by virtue of their very perplexity, have a difficulty in getting into literature. There was nothing of the tall, blond, silent Englishman about this man, at all. Yet there was probably no mingling of foreign blood in him since Phœnician times. He was entirely and utterly English. He can be found in no other land, and yet is to be found in all lands, generally with a concession from the government and a turbulent band of assistants. His sloping simian forehead was growing bald, and it gleamed as he came over to where I sat. His jaws, blue from the razor, creased as he drew back his chin and began his inevitable movement of the shoulders that preluded speech. He was English, and was about to prove his racial affinity beyond all cavil.

‘But why get yourself demobilized out here?’ I demanded, when he had explained. ‘Is there a job to be had?’

’Job!' he echoed, eyebrows raised, as he looked over his shoulder with apparent animosity. ‘Job! There ’s a fortune out here! See this,’

He dived over the bed to where his uniform lay, and extracted from the breast-pocket a folded sheet of gray paper. Inside was a large roughly penciled tracing of the Eastern Mediterranean. There was practically no nomenclature. An empty Italy kicked at an equally vacuous Sicily. Red blots marked ports. The seas were spattered with figures, as in a chart, marking soundings. And laid out in straggling lines, like radiating constellalions, were green and yellow and violet crosses. From Genoa to Marseilles, from Marseilles to Oran, from Port Said and Alexandria to Cape Bon, from Salonika to Taranto, those polychromatic clusters looped and clotted in the sea-lanes, until the eye, roving at last toward the intricate configuration of the Cyclades, caught sight of the Sea of Marmora, where the green symbols formed a closely woven texture.

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked, amazed; and Heatly smoothed the crackling paper as it lay between us on the bed. His shoulders worked and his chin drew back, as if he were about to spring upon me.

‘That’s telling,’ he grunted. ‘The point, is, do you want to come in on this? These green ones, y’ understand, are soft things, in less ’n ten fathom. The yellows are deeper. The others are too big or too deep for us.’

‘Who ’s us?’ I asked, beginning to feel an interest beyond his own personality.

He began to fold up the chart, which had no doubt come by unfrequented ways from official dossiers.

‘There’s the skipper and the mate and meself,’ he informed me; ‘but we can do with another engineer. — Come in with us!’ he ejaculated; ‘it’s the chance of a lifetime. You put up five hundred, and it’s share and share alike.’

I had to explain, of course, that what he suggested was quite impossible. I was not demobilized. I had to join a ship in dock-yard hands. Moreover, I had no five hundred to put up.

He did not press the point. It seemed to me that he had simply been the temporary vehicle of an obscure wave of sentiment. We had been shipmates in the old days. He had never been a friend of mine, it must be understood. We had wrangled and snarled at each other over hot and dirty work, and had gone our separate ways ashore, and he had rushed from the shipping-office that day in Shields and never even said good-bye ere he caught the train to Newcastle and matrimony. Yet here now, after nine years, he abruptly offered me a fortune! The slow inexorable passage of time had worn away the ephemeral scoria of our relations and laid bare an unexpected vein of durable esteem. Even now, as I say, he did not press the point. He was loath to admit any emotion beyond a gruff solicitude for my financial aggrandizement.

While we were bickering amiably on these lines, the high, narrow door opened, and the buxom woman appeared with a tea-tray. She smiled and went over to the embrasured window, where there stood a table. As she stood there, in her neat black dress and white apron, her dark hair drawn in smooth convolutions about her placid brows, her eyes declined upon the apparatus on the tray, she had the air of demure sophistication and sainted worldliness to be found in lady prioresses and mother superiors when dealing with secular aliens. She was an intriguing anomaly in this stronghold of ancient and militant celibates. The glamour of her individual illusion survived even the introduction that followed.

‘This is Emma,’ said Heatly, as if indicating a natural but amusing feature of the landscape; ‘Emma, an old shipmate o’ mine. Let him have that room next to this. Anybody been?’

‘Yes,’ said Emma in a soft, gentle voice, ‘Captain Gosnell rang up. He wants to see you at the usual place.’

‘Then I’ll be going,’ said Heatly, drinking tea standing, a trick abhorred by those who regard tea as something of a ritual. ‘Lay for four at our table to-night, and send to the Regina for my friend’s gear. And mind, no games!'

He placed his arm about her waist. Then, seizing a rakish-looking deerstalker, he made for the door, and halted abruptly, looking back upon us with apparent malevolence. Emma smiled without resigning her pose of sorrowful experience, and the late engineer lieutenant slipped through the door and was gone.

So there were to be no games. I looked at Emma, and stepped over to help myself to tea. There were to be no games. Comely as she was, there was no more likelihood of selecting the cloistral Emma for trivial gallantry than of pulling the admiral’s nose. I had other designs on Emma. I had noted the relations of those two with attention, and it was patent to me that Emma could tell me a good deal more about Heatly than Heatly knew about himself. Heatly was that sort of man. He would be a problem of enigmatic opacity to men, and a crystalclear solution to the cool, disillusioned matron.

And Emma told. Women are not only implacable realists, they are unconscious artists. They dwell always in the Palace of Unpalatable Truth, and never by any chance is there a magic talisman to save them from their destiny. Speech is their ultimate need. We exist for them only in so far as we can be described. As the incarnate travesties of a mystical ideal, we inspire ecstasies of romantic supposition. There is a rapt expression on the features of a woman telling about a man.

Duty and pleasure melt into one suffusing emotion and earth holds for her no holier achievement. And so, as the reader is ready enough to believe, there were no games. Apart from her common urbane humanity, Emma’s lot in life, as the deserted wife of a Highland sergeant deficient in emotional stability, had endowed her with the smooth efficiency of a character in a novel. She credited me with a complete inventory of normal virtues and experiences, and proceeded to increase my knowledge of life.

II

The point of her story, as I gathered, was this. My friend Heatly, in the course of the years, had completed the cycle of existence without in any degree losing the interest of women. I knew he was married. Emma informed me that they had seven children. The youngest had been born six months before. Where? Why, in the house in Gateshead, of course. Did I know Gateshead? I did. As I sat in that embrasured window and looked down the thin, deep slit of the Strada Lucia, past green and saffron balconies and jutting shrines, to where the Harbor of Marsamuscetto showed a patch of solid dark blue below the distant perfection of Sheina, I thought of Gateshead, with the piercing East Coast wind ravening along its gray, dirty streets, with its frowsy fringe of coalstaithes standing black and stark above the icy river, and I heard the grind and yammer of the grimy street-cars striving to drown the harsh boom and crash from the great yards of Elswick on the far bank. I saw myself again hurrying along in the rain, a tired young man in overalls, making hurried purchases of gear and tobacco and rough gray blankets, for the ship was to sail on the turn of the tide. And I found it easy to see the small two-story house half-way down one of those incredibly ignoble streets, the rain, driven by the cruel wind, whipping against sidewalk and window, the front garden a mere puddle of mud, and indoors a harassed, dogged woman fighting her way to the day’s end, while a horde of robust children romped and gorged and blubbered around her.

‘Seven,’ I murmured, and the bells of a herd of goats made a musical commotion in the street below.

‘Seven,’ said Emma, refilling my cup.

‘And he’s not going home yet, even though he has got out of the navy,’ I observed with tactful abstraction.

‘That’s just it,’ said Emma, ‘not going home. He’s gone into this salvage business, you see. I believe it’s a very good thing.’

‘Of course his wife gets her half-pay,’ I mused.

‘She gets all his pay,’ accented Emma. ‘He sends it all. He has other ways — you understand. Resources. But he won’t go home. You know, there’s somebody here.’

So here we were coming to it. It had been dawning on me, as I stared down at the blue of the Marsamuscetto, that possibly Heatly’s interest for Emma had been heightened by the fact that he was a widower. Nothing so crude as that, however. Something much more interesting to the high gods. Between maturity and second childhood, if events are propitious, men come to a period of augmented curiosity fortified by a vague sense of duties accomplished. They acquire a conviction that, beyond the comfortable and humdrum vales of domestic felicity, where they have lived so long, there lie peaks of ecstasy and mountainranges of perilous dalliance. I roused suddenly.

‘But now he’s out of the navy,’ I remarked.

‘You must n’t think that,’ said Emma. ‘He is n’t that sort of man. I tell you, she’s all right.’

‘ Who? The somebody who’s here? ’

‘No, his wife’s all right as far as money goes. But there’s no sympathy between them. A man can’t go on all his life without sympathy.’

‘What is she like?’ I asked, not so sure of this.

‘Oh, I’m not defending him,’ said Emma with her eyes fixed on the sugarbowl. ‘Goodness knows I’ve no reason to think well of men, and you’re all alike. Only, he’s throwing himself away on a — Well, never mind. You ’ll see her. Here’s your room. You can have this connecting door open if you like.’

‘Fine,’ I said, looking round, and then walking into a sort of vast and comfortable crypt. The walls, five feet thick, were pierced on opposite sides as for cannon, and one looked instinctively for the inscriptions by prisoners and ribald withicisms by sentries. There was the Strada Lucia again, beyond a delicious green railing; and behind was another recess, from whose shuttered aperture one beheld the hotel courtyard, with a giant tree swelling up and almost touching the yellow walls. I looked at the groined roof, the distant white-curtained bed, the cupboards of black wood, the tiled floor with its old, worn mats. I looked out of the window into the street, and was startled by an unexpectedly near view of a saint in a blue niche by the window, a saint with a long sneering nose and a supercilious expression as she looked down with her stony eyes on the Strada Lucia. I looked across the Strada Lucia, and saw dark eyes and disdainful features at magic casements. And I told Emma that I would take the apartment.

‘You ’ll find Mr. Heatly in the Café de la Reine,’ she remarked gently; ‘he’s there with Captain Gosnell.'

But I wanted to see neither Heatly nor Captain Gosncll just yet. I said I would be back to dinner, and took my cap and cane.

III

After wandering about the town, gazing upon the cosmopolitan crowd that thronged the streets, and musing upon many things, — upon deserted wives and deserting husbands, and their respective fates, — I approached the Libreria, and saw Heatly seated at a table with two other men, in the shadow of one of the great columns. Just behind him a young Maltese kneeled by a great long-haired goat, which he was milking swiftly into a glass for a near-by customer. Heatly, however, was not drinking milk. He was talking. There were three of them and their heads were together over the drinks on the little marble table, so absorbed that they took no notice at all of the lively scene about them.

There was about these men an aura of supreme happiness. In the light of a match-flare, as they lit fresh cigarettes, their features showed up harsh and masculine, the faces of men who dealt neither in ideas nor in emotions, but in prejudices and instincts and desires. Then Heatly turned and saw me, and further contemplation was out of the question.

IV

Of that evening and the tale they told me, there is no record by the alert psychologist. There is a roseate glamour over a confusion of memories. There are recollections of exalted emotions and unparalleled eloquence. We traversed vast distances and returned safely, arm in arm. We were the generals of famous campaigns, the heroes of colossal achievements, and the conquerors of proud and beautiful women.

From the swaying platforms of the Fourth Dimension we caught glimpses of starry destinies. We stood on the shoulders of the lesser gods, to see our enemies confounded. And out of the mist and fume of the evening emerges a shadowy legend of the sea.

By a legerdemain which seemed timely and agreeably inexplicable, the marble table under the arcade of the Libreria became a linen-covered table in an immense and lofty chamber. We were at dinner. The ceiling was a gilded framework of paneled paintings. Looking down upon us from afar were well-fed anchorites and buxom saints. Their faces gleamed from out a dark and polished obscurity, and their ivory arms emerged from the convolutions of ruby and turquoise-velvet draperies. Tall candelabra supported colored globes, which shed a mellow radiance upon the glitter of silver and crystal. There was a sound of music, which rose and fell as some distant door swung to and fro; the air still trembled with the pulsing reverberations of a great gong, and a thin whine, which was the food-elevator ascending in dry grooves from the kitchen, seemed to spur the fleet-footed waiters to a frenzy of service. High cabinets of dark wood stood between tall narrow windows housing collections of sumptuous plates and gilded wares. On side tables heaps of bread and fruit made great masses of solid color, of gamboge, saffron, and tawny orange. Long-necked bottles appeared reclining luxuriously in wicker cradles, like philosophic pagans about to bleed to death.

At a table by the distant door sits the little boy with the freckled nose and beautiful gray eyes. He writes in a large book as the waiters pause on tip-toe, dishes held as if in votive offering to a red Chinese dragon on the mantel above the boy’s head. He writes, and looking out down the entrance, suddenly laughs in glee. From the corridor come whoops and a staccato cackle of laughter, followed by a portentous roll of thunder from the great gong. The boy puts his hand over his mouth in his ecstasy, the waiters grin as they hasten, the head waiter moves over from the windows, thinking seriously, and one has a vision of Emma, mildly distraught, at the door. Captain Gosnell, holding up the corner of his serviette, remarks that they are coming, and studies the winelist.

They rush in, and a monocled major at a near-by table pauses, fork in air over his fried sea-trout, and glares. In the forefront of the bizarre procession comes Heatly, with a Russian guardsman on his back. The other two guardsmen follow, dancing a stately measure, revolving with rhythmic gravity. Behind, waltzing alone, is Mr. Marks, the mate. Instantly, however, the play is over. They break away, the guardsman slips to the floor, and they all assume a demeanor of impenetrable reserve as they walk decorously toward us. They sit, and become merged in the collective mood of the chamber. Yet one has a distinct impression of a sudden glimpse into another world — as if the thin yet durable membrane of existence had split open a little, and one saw, for a single moment, men as they really are.

And while I am preoccupied with this fancy, which is mysteriously collated in the mind with a salmi of quails, Captain Gosnell becomes articulate. He is explaining something to me.

It is time Captain Gosnell should be described. He sits on my left, a portly, powerful man, with a large red nose and great baggy pouches under his stern eyes. It is he who tells the story. I watch him as he dissects his quail. Of his own volition he tells me he has twice swallowed the anchor. And here he is, still on the job. Did he say twice? Three times, counting — well, it was this way.

First of all, an aunt left him a little money and he quit a second mate’s job to start a small provision store. Failed. Had to go to sea again. Then he married. Wife had a little money, so they started again. Prospered. Two stores, both doing well. Two counters, I am to understand. Canned goods, wines and spirits on one side; meats and so forth on the other. High-class clientèle. Wonderful head for business, Mrs. Gosnell’s. He himself, understand, not so dusty. Had a way with customers. Could sell pork in a synagogue, as the saying is.

And then Mrs. Gosnell died. Great shock to him, of course, and took all the heart out of him. Buried her and went back to sea. She was insured, and later, with what little money he had, he started an agency for carpet-sweeping machinery. Found it difficult to get on with his captain, you see, being a senior man in a junior billet. As I very likely am aware, standing rigging makes poor running gear. Was doing a very decent little business too, when — the war. So he went into the Naval Reserve. That’s how it all came about. Now, his idea is to go back, with the experience he has gained, and start a store again — merchandising in his opinion, is the thing of the future. With a little money, the thing can be done. Well!

But it was necessary to have a little capital. Say five thousand. So here we were.

A bad attack of pneumonia with gastritis finished him at Dover. Doctor said if he got away to a warmer climate, it would make a new man of him. So a chat with a surgeon-commander in London resulted in his being appointed to a mine-layer bound for the Eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps I had heard of her. The Ouzel. Sidewheeler built for the excursionists. Started away from Devon port and took her to Port Said. Imagine it! Think of her bouncing from one mountainous wave to another, off Finisterre. Think of her turning over and over, almost, going round St. Vincent. Fine little craft for all that. Heatly here was Chief. Marks here was Mate. It was a serious responsibility.

And when they reached Port Said, they were immediately loaded with mines and sent straight out again to join the others, who were laying a complicated barrage about fifty miles north. Four days out, one day in. It was n’t so bad at first, being one of a company, with constant signaling and visits in fine weather. But later, when the Ouzel floated alone in an immense blue circle of sea and sky, they began to get acquainted. This took the common English method of discovering, one by one, each other’s weaknesses, and brooding over them in secret. What held them together most firmly appears to have been a sort of sophisticated avoidance of women. Not in so many words, Captain Gosnell assures me, but taking it for granted, they found a common ground in ‘Keeping in the fairway.’ Marks was a bachelor, it is true, but Marks had no intention of being anything else. Marks had other fish to fry, I am to understand.

I look at Marks, who sits opposite to me. He has a full round face, cleanshaved, and flexible as an actor’s. His rich brown hair, a thick, solid-looking auburn thatch, suddenly impresses me with its extreme incongruity. As I look at him, he puts up Ids hand, pushes his hair slowly up over his forehead, like a cap, revealing a pink scalp, rolls the whole contrivance from side to side, and brings it back to its normal position.

More for comfort than anything else, Captain Gosnell assures me, for nobody is deceived by a wig like that. What is a man to do when he has pretty near the whole top of his head blown off by a gasometer exploding on the Western Front? There’s Marks, minus his hair and everything else, pretty well buried in a pit of loose cinders. Lamppost blown over, lying across him. Marks lay quiet enough, thinking. He was n’t dead, he could breathe, and one hand moved easily in the cinders. Began to paddle with that hand. Went on thinking and paddling. Soon he could move the other hand. Head knocking against the lamp-post, he paddled downward. Found he was moving slowly forward. Head clear of the lamppost. Gritty work, swimming, as it were, in loose ashes. Hands in shocking condition. Scalp painful. Lost his hair, but kept his head. Suddenly his industriously paddling hands swirled into the air, jerking legs drove him upward, and he spewed the abrasive element from his lips. He had come back. And had brought an idea with him. Before he went into the army, Marks was second officer in the Marchioness Line, afflicted with dreams of inventing unsinkable ships and collapsible life-boats. Now he came back to life with a brand-new notion. What was it? Well, we ’d be having a run over to the ship bye-and-bye and I would see it. It could do everything except sing a comic song.

‘We had been relieved one evening,’ Captain Gosnell observes, ‘and were about hull down and under, when I ordered dead slow for a few hours. The reason for this was that, at full speed, we would reach Fort Said about three in the afternoon, and it was generally advised to arrive after sunset, or even after dark. Besides this, I set a course to pass round to the east’ard of a field we had laid a week or so before, instead of to the west’ard. This is a simple enough matter of running off the correct distances, for the current, if anything, increased the margin of safety. We were making about four knots, with the mine-field on the starboard bow, as I calculated, and we were enjoying a very pleasant supper in my cabin, which had been the passenger saloon in the Ouzel’s excursion days — a fine large room on the upper deck, with big windows, like a house ashore. The old bus was chugging along, and from my table you could see the horizon all round, except just astern, which was hid by the funnel. Nothing there, however, but good salt water, and the Holy Land a long way behind. It was like sitting in a conservatory. The sea was as smooth as glass, with a fine haze to the south’ard!. This haze, as far as I could judge, was moving north at about the same speed as we were going south, which would make it eight knots, and in an hour we would be in it. I mention this because it explains why the three of us, sitting in a cabin on an upper deck, saw the battleship all together, all at once, and quite near. We all went on the bridge.

‘Now you must understand,’ went or Captain Gosnell, ‘that the subject of conversation between us while we were at supper was money. We were discussing the best way of getting hold of money, and the absolute necessity of capital after the war, if we were to get anywhere. This war, you know, has been a three-ringed circus for the young fellows. But to men like us it has n’t been anything of the sort. We have a very strong conviction that some of us are going to feel the draft. We are n’t so young as we used to be, and a little money would be a blessing. Well, we were talking about our chances — of salvage, prize-money, bonuses, and so forth. Our principal notion, if I remember, that evening, was to go into business and pool our resources. For one thing, we wanted to keep up the association. And then, out of the Lord knows where, came this great gray warship heading straight — ’

Captain Gosnell paused and regarded me with an austere glance. Mr. Marks and Heatly were listening and looking at us watchfully. And over Mr. Marks’s shoulder I could see the three officers with their polychromatic uniforms gleaming in the soft orange radiance of shaded lamps.

‘You understand what I mean?’ said Captain Gosnell. ‘We stood on the bridge watching that ship come up on us, watching her through our glasses, and we did not attach any particular importance to her appearance. When we saw the Russian ensign astern, it did not mean a great deal to us. She was as much an anomaly in those terrible waters as a line-of-battle ship of Nelson’s day. That was what staggered us. An enormous valuable ship like that coming out into such a sea. Suddenly the value of her, the money she cost, the money she was worth, so near and yet so far, came home to us. I had an imaginary view of her, you understand, for a moment, as something I could sell: a sort of fanciful picture of her possibilities in the junk line. Think of the brass and rubber alone, in a ship like that! And then we all simultaneously realized just what was happening. I had my hand stretched out to the whistle-lanyard, when there was a heavy, bubbling grunt, and she rolled over toward us as if some invisible hand had given her a push. She rolled back to an even keel and began pitching a very little. This was due, I believe, to the sudden going astern of her engines, coupled with the mine throwing her over. Pitched a little, and, for some extraordinary reason, her forward twelve-inch guns were rapidly elevated as if some insane gunner was going to take a shot at the North Star before going down. From what we gathered later, things were going on inside that turret which are unpleasant to think about. There was that ship, twenty-five thousand tons of her, going through a number of peculiar evolutions. Like most battleships, she had four anchors in her bows, and suddenly they all shot out of their hawse-pipes and fell into the sea, while clouds of red dust came away, as if she was breathing fire and smoke at us through her nostrils. And then she began to swing round on them, so that, as we came up to her, she showed us her great rounded armored counter, with its captain’s gallery and a little white awning to keep off the sun. And what we saw then passed anything in my experience on this earth, ashore or afloat. We were coming up on her, you know, and we had our glasses so that, as the stern swung on us, we had a perfectly close view of that gallery. There were two bearded men sitting there, in uniforms covered with gold lace and dangling decorations, smoking cigarettes, each in a large wicker chair on either side of a table. Behind them the big armored doors were open and the mahogany slides drawn back, and we could see silver and china and very elaborate electrical fittings shining on the table, and men in white coats walking about without any anxiety at all. On the stern was a great golden two-headed eagle, and a name in their peculiar wrong-way-round lettering which Serge told us later was Fontanka. And they sat there, those two men with gray beards on their breasts like large bibs, smoking and chatting and pointing out the Ouzel to each other. It was incredible. And in the cabin behind them servants went round and round, and a lamp was burning in front of a large picture of the Virgin in a glittering frame. An icon. I can assure you, their placid demeanor almost paralyzed us. We began to wonder if we had n’t dreamed what had gone before, if we were n’t still dreaming. But she continued to swing and we continued to come up on her, so that soon we had a view along her decks again, and we knew well enough we were n’t dreaming very much.

‘Her decks were alive with men. They moved continually, replacing each other like a mass of insects on a beam. It appeared, from where we were, a cable’s length or so, like an orderly panic. There must have been five or six hundred of them climbing, running, walking, pushing, pulling, like one of those football matches at the big schools, where everybody plays at once. And then our whistle blew. I give you my word I did it quite unconsciously, in my excitement. If it had been Gabriel’s trumpet, it could not have caused greater consternation. I think a good many of them thought it was Gabriel’s trumpet. It amounted to that almost, for the Fontanka took a sort of slide forward at that moment and sank several feet by the head. All those hundreds of men mounted the rails and put up their hands and shouted. It was the most horrible thing. They stood there with uplifted hands and their boats half-lowered, and shouted. I believe they imagined that I was going alongside to take them off. But I had no such intention. The Ouzel’s sponsons would have been smashed, her paddles wrecked, and we would probably have gone to the bottom along with them. We looked at each other and shouted in sheer fury at their folly. We bawled and made motions to lower their boats. I put the helm over and moved off a little, and ordered our own boat down. The fog was coming up and the sun was going down. The only thing that was calm was the sea. It was like a lake.

Suddenly, several of the Fontanka’s boats almost dropped into the water, and the men began to slide down the falls like strings of blue and white beads. She took another slide, very slow but very sickening to see.

’I fixed my glasses on the superstructure between the funnels, where a large steel crane curved over a couple of launches with polished brass funnels. And I was simply appalled to find a woman sitting in one of the launches, with her arms round a little boy. She was quite composed, apparently, and was watching three men who were working very hard about the crane. The launch began to rise in the air, and two of the men climbed into her. She rose, and the crane swung outward. We cheered like maniacs when she floated. In a flash the other man was climbing up the curve of the crane, and we saw him slide down the wire into the launch.

‘By this time, you must understand, the other boats were full of men, and one of them was cast off while more men were sliding down the falls. They held on with one hand and waved the other at the men above, who proceeded in a very systematic way to slide on top of them, and then the whole bunch would carry away altogether and vanish with a sort of compound splash. And then men began to come out of side-scuttles. They were in a great hurry, these chaps. A head would appear, and then shoulders and arms working violently. The man would be just getting his knees in a purchase on the scuttle frame, when he would shoot out clean head-first into the sea. And another head, the head of the man who had pushed him, would come out.

‘But don’t forget,’ warned Captain Gosnell, ‘ that all these things were happening at once. Don’t forget that the Fontanka was still swarming with men, that the sun was just disappearing, very red, in the west, that the ship’s bows were about level with the water. Don’t forget all this,’ urged Captain Gosnell, ‘and then, when you’ve got that all firmly fixed in your mind, she turns right over, shows the great red belly of her for perhaps twenty seconds, and sinks.’

Captain Gosnell held the match for a moment longer to his cigar, threw the stick on the floor, and strode into the room, leaving me to imagine the thing he had described.

V

And these three, in their deftly handled and slow-moving launch, with their incredible passengers, the woman with her arms round a little boy, were the first to board the Ouzel. Captain Gosnell had stopped his engines, for the sea was thick with swimming and floating men. They explained through Serge, who had climbed down the crane, — a man of extended experience in polar regions,— that they were officers in the Imperial Russian Army, entrusted with the safe-conduct of the lady and her child, and therefore claimed precedence over naval ratings.

That was all very well, of course; but the naval ratings were already swarming up the low fenders of the Ouzel, climbing the paddle-boxes and making excellent use of the ropes and slings flung to them by the Ouzel’s crew. The naval ratings were displaying the utmost activity on their own accounts; they immediately manned the launch, and set off to garner the occupants of rafts and gratings. Even in her excursion days, the Ouzel had never had so many passengers. Captain Gosnell would never have believed, if he had not seen it, that five-hundred-odd souls could have found room to breathe on her decks and in her alleyways. All dripping sea-water.

Captain Gosnell, leaning back on the maroon-velvet settee and drawing at his cigar, nodded toward the talented Serge, who was now playing an intricate version of‘Tipperary,’ with many arpeggios, and remarked that he had to use him as an interpreter. The senior naval officer saved was a gentleman who came aboard in his shirt and drawers and a gold wrist-watch, having slipped off his clothes on the bridge before jumping; but he spoke no English. Serge spoke ‘pretty good English.’ Serge interpreted excellently. Having seen the lady and her little boy, who had gray eyes and a freckled nose, installed in the main cabin, he drew the captain aside and explained to him the supreme importance of securing the exact position of the foundered ship; ‘in case,’he said, ‘it was found possible to raise her.’

And when we got in, and transferred the men to hospital, and I had made my report, they gave me no information to speak of about the ship. I don’t think they were very clear themselves what she was to do, beyond making for the Adriatic. As for the passengers, they never mentioned them at all, so of course I held my tongue and drew my conclusions. Serge told me they had been bound for an Italian port, whence his party was to proceed to Paris. Now he would have to arrange passages to Marseilles. He took suites in the Marina Hotel, interviewed agents and banks, hired a motor-car, and had uniforms made by the best Greek tailor in the town. We were living at the Marina while ashore, you see, and so it was easy for us to get very friendly. Heatly, there, was soon very friendly with the lady.

‘No,’ said Captain Gosnell with perfect frankness in reply to my look of sophistication, ‘ not in the very slightest degree. Nothing of that. If you ask me, I should call it a sort of — chivalry. Anybody who thinks there was ever anything — er — what you suggest — has no conception of the real facts of the case.’

This was surprising. It seemed to put Emma in an equivocal position, and my respect for that woman made me reluctant to doubt her intelligence. But Captain Gosnell was in a better position than Emma to give evidence. Captain Gosnell was conscious that a man can run right through the hazards of existence and come out on the other side with his fundamental virtues unimpaired. They all shared this sentiment, I gathered, for this lovely woman with the bronze hair and gray eyes; but Heatly’s imagination had been touched to an extraordinary degree. In their interminable discussions concerning their future movements, discussions highly technical in their nature, because investigating a sunken armored warship is a highly technical affair, Heatly would occasionally interpret a word, emphasizing the importance of giving her a fair deal.

’But she never reached Marseilles. They were two days off Malta when an Austrian submarine torpedoed the French liner and sank her. They did not fire on the boats. And our lady friend found herself being rowed slowly toward a place of which she had no knowledge whatever. Serge told us they were pulling for eighteen hours before they were picked up.'

‘And she is here now?’ I asked cautiously.

‘Here now,’ said Captain Gosnell. ‘She usually comes down here for an hour in the evening. If she’s here, I’ll introduce you.’

VI

She was sitting on a plush lounge at the extreme rear of the café, and when I first set eyes on her, I was disappointed. I had imagined something much more magnificent, more alluring, than this. In spite of Captain Gosnell’s severely prosaic narrative of concrete facts, he had been unable to keep from me the real inspiration of the whole adventure. I was prepared to murmur, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ and so on, as much as I could remember of that famous bit of rant. One gets an exalted notion of women who are credited with such powers, who preserve some vestige of the magic that can make men ‘immortal with a kiss.’ Bionda, in a large fur coat and a broad-brimmed hat of black velvet, had cloaked her divinity, and the first impression was Christian rather than pagan. ‘A tired saint,’ I thought, as I sat down after the introduction and looked at the pale bronze hair and the intelligent gray eyes.

She had a very subtle and pretty way of expressing her appreciation of the homage rendered by these diverse masculine personalities. Her hands, emerging from the heavy fur sleeves, were white and extremely thin, with several large rings. She had nothing to say to a stranger, which was natural enough, and I sat in silence watching her. She spoke English with musical deliberation, rolling the r’s and hesitating at times in a choice of words, so that one waited with pleasure upon her pauses and divined the rhythm of her thoughts. She preserved in all its admirable completeness that mystery concerning their ultimate purpose in the world which is so essential to women in the society of men. And it was therefore with some surprise that I heard her enunciate with intense feeling, ‘Oh, never, never, never!’ There was an expression of sad finality about it. She was conveying to them her fixed resolve never to board a ship again. Ships had been altogether too much for her. She had been inland all her life, and her recent catastrophes had robbed her of her reserves of fortitude. She would remain here in this island. She sat staring at the marble table as if she saw in imagination the infinite reaches of the ocean, blue, green, gray, or black, forever fluid and treacherous, a sinister superficies beneath which the bodies and achievements of men disappeared as into some unknown lower region.

Women have many valid reasons for haling the sea; and this woman seemed dimly aware of a certain jealousy of it—that alluring masculine element which destroys men without any aid from women at all. Her faith in ships had not suffered shipwreck, so much as foundered.

They were all agreed. Serge was of the opinion that, if they recovered a tenth of the bullion which her husband, who had a platinum concession in the Asiatic Urals, had consigned to his agent in Paris, there would be enough for all. Serge, in short, became the active spirit of the enterprise. He knew how to obtain funds from mysterious firms who had quiet offices down secluded alleys near Copthall Court and Great St. Helens, in London. He made sketches and explained where the stuff was stowed, and, presuming the ship to be in such and such a position, what bulk-heads had to be penetrated to get into her. He obtained permission to accompany the Ouzel on her four-day cruises, and they never had a dull moment. He brought water-colors along, purchased at immense expense from the local extortioners, and made astonishing drawings of his hosts and their excursion steamer. He sang songs in a voice like a musical snarl — songs in obscure dialects, songs in indecent French, songs in booming Russian. He danced native Russian dances, and the click of his heels was like a pneumatic calking-tool at. work on a rush job. His large, serious face, with the long, finely formed nose, the sensitive mouth, the sad dark eyes suddenly illuminated by a beautiful smile, the innumerable tiny criss-cross corrugations above the cheek-bones which are the marks of life in polar regions, fascinated the Englishmen. Without ever admitting it in so many words, they knew him to be that extremely rare phenomenon, a leader of men on hazardous and lonely quests. Without being at all certain of his name, which was polysyllabic and rather a burden to an Anglo-Saxon larynx, they discovered his character with unerring accuracy. From the very first they seem to have been conscious of the spiritual aspect of the adventure. They listened to the tittle-tattle of the hotel bars and the Casino dances, and refrained from comment. The scheme grew in their minds and preoccupied them. Mr. Marks and Heatly spent days and nights over strange designs, and Heatly himself worked at the bench in the port alleyway, between the paddle-box and the engine-room, constructing mechanical monstrosities.

But as weeks went by and Serge continued to communicate with Paris and London, it became clear that he was not at all easy in his mind. Some people say, of course, that no Russian is easy in his mind; but this was an altruistic anxiety. He judged that it would be best for them to get on to Paris, where Bionda had relatives and he himself could resume active operations.

And so they started, this time in a French mail-boat bound for Marseilles. Our three mine-sweepers saw them off. And Captain Gosnell, as we walked up the Strada Stretta and emerged upon the brilliant Strada Reale, was able to convey a hint of the actual state of affairs.

’She knew nothing,’he said. ‘She was still under the impression that there would always be an endless stream of money coming from somebody in Paris or London. She was, if you can excuse the word, like a child empress. But there was n’t any such stream. Serge and the others had a little of their own; but hers was mostly in an ammunition chamber on B deck in a foundered warship, along with the bullion, bound to the Siberian Bank. She was n’t worrying about money at all. She was wishing she was in Marseilles, for her experiences on ships had n’t given her a very strong confidence in their safety. And Serge was anxious to get her to Paris, to her relatives, before what money she had ran out.’

Suddenly she gathered up her gloves and trinkets and said she must be going. She had worked hard that day and was tired. We rose and, as if by preconcerted arrangement, divided into two parties. It was the general rule, I gathered, that the gentlemen who had acted as her bodyguard for so long should undertake this nightly escort. We filed out into the deserted square, and the last view we had of them was the small fur-clad figure tripping away up the empty and romantic street, while over her towered the three tall soldiers, looking like benevolent brigands in their dark cloaks.

As we turned toward the Grand Harbor, Captain Gosnell remarked that, if I cared to come, they could show me something I had probably never seen before. We descended the stone stairs leading to the Custom House Quay. To see them diving with long strides down those broad, shallow steps, the solitary lamps, burning before dim shrines high up, lighting their forms as for some religious mystery, they appeared as men plunging in the grip of powerful and diverse emotions. The captain was plain enough to any intelligence. He desired money that he might maintain his position in England — a country where it is almost better to lose one’s soul than one’s position. Mr. Marks, beneath the genial falsity of a wig, concealed an implacable fidelity to a mechanical ideal. Heatly, on the other hand, was not so easily analyzed as Emma had suggested. He appeared the inarticulate victim of a remote and magnificent devotion. He gave the impression of a sort of proud disgust that he should have been thus afflicted.

So we came down to the water, and walked along the quay until we hailed a small, broad-beamed steamer, very brightly lighted but solitary, so that Captain Gosnell had to use a silver whistle that he carried, and the shrill blast echoed from the high ramparts of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo.

A boat came slowly toward us, and we went aboard. She was a strangeblend of expensive untidiness. Great pumps and hoses, costly even when purchased second-hand, lay red and rusty and slathered with dry mud about her decks. We descended a foul ladder through an iron scuttle leading to the one great hold forward. The ’tween-decks were workshops, with lathes, drills, and savage-looking torch-furnaces. Things that looked like lawn-mowers afflicted with elephantiasis revealed themselves on inspection as submersible boring-heads and cutters that went down into inaccessible places, like marine ferrets, and did execution there.

In the centre, however, suspended from a beam, was the masterpiece. It would be vain to describe the indescribable. It resembled in a disturbing way a giant spider with its legs curled semicircularly about its body. A formidable domed thing, with circular glass eyes set in it, and a door as of a safe or the breech-block of a gun. From this protruded a number of odd-looking mechanisms, and below it, flanked by caterpillar belts, on which the contrivance walked with dignity upon the bed of the ocean, were large, sharp-bladed cutters, like steel whorls.

While I gazed at this, endeavoring to decide how much was reality and how much merely excited imagination, Mr. Marks went down and proceeded to set a ladder against the side of the machine. He grasped wheels and levers, he spoke with vehemence to Heatly, who ran to a switchboard and encased his head in a kind of listening helmet. Then Mr. Marks climbed nimbly through the aperture and drew the door to with a click. A light appeared within, shining through the enormously thick glass, and showing a fantastic travesty of Mr. Marks moving about in his steel prison. Captain Gosnell indicated the triumphant perfection of this thing. They were in constant telephonic connection with him. He could direct a bright beam in any direct ion, and he could animate any one or all of the extraordinary limbs of the machine. Suppose a ship lay in sand shale, mud, or gravel. He could dig himself under her, dragging a hawser which could be made fast to a float on each side. He could fasten on to a given portion of the hull, drill it, cut it, and in time crawl inside on the caterpillar feet. He had food, hot and cold drinks, and oxygen for two days. He could sit and read if he liked, or talk to the people on the ship. And quite safe, no matter how deep. Wonderful!

I dare say it was. It was a fabulouslooking thing, anyhow, and as Mr. Marks, moving like a visible brain in a transparent skull, started and stopped his alarming extremities, it struck me that humanity was in danger of transcending itself at last. It was soothing to come up on deck again and see Sant’ Angelo in the moonlight like the backcloth of an Italian opera. It was a comfort to hear that one of the men, who ought to have been on duty, was drunk. Perhaps he had found the machinery too powerful for his poor weak human soul and had fled ashore to drown the nightmare of mechanism in liquor. One could imagine the men-at-arms, whose duty it was to watch from those stone towers, slipping out of some newly invented corselet with a jangle and clang, and stealing away in an old leather jerkin, only half laced, to make a night of it.

Not that there was anything fundamentally at odds with romance in this extraordinary adventure into deep waters, I mused, as I lay in my vast chamber that night. Knights in armor, releasing virgin forces of wealth buried in the ocean. Heatly was moving about in the next room, smoking a cigarette.

‘What, does she do for a living?’ I asked.

He came and stood in the doorway in his pajamas. He blew a thread of tobacco from his lips.

‘She keeps a tea-shop near the Opera House,’ he said. ‘We don’t go there; knowing her as we do, it would n’t be the right thing.’

‘But I can, I suppose,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, you can, I suppose,’ he assented from somewhere within his room.

‘You don’t object, of course?’ I went on.

The light went out.

VII

Wedged in between Lanceolotte’s music-shop and Marcus’s emporium of Maltese bijouterie I found a modest door and window. In the latter was a simple card with the word TEAS in large print. Below it was a samovar, and a couple of table centres made of the local lace.

‘Can I go upstairs?’ I asked the little boy with the gray eyes and freckled nose; and he smiled and nodded with delightful friendliness.

‘Then I will,’ I said; and he rushed up in front of me.

There was nobody there. He cleared a table by the low window. Across the street was the broad and beautiful façade of the Opera House. The announcement board bore the legend ‘Tonight — Faust.’

‘You want tea?’ said the boy, with a forward dart of his head, like an inquisitive bird.

I nodded.

‘Toast?’

I nodded again. ‘I thought you were at the hotel,’ I remarked.

‘Only in the evenings,’ he explained, lifting his tray. ‘You want cakes, too?’

I nodded again, and he seemed to approve of my catholic taste. A low voice said, ‘ Karl! ’ and he hurried down out of sight.

I was sitting there munching a bun and enjoying some really well-made tea (with lemon), and watching a number of cheerful well-dressed people emerging from the theatre, when something caused me to look round, and I saw the face of Bionda just above the floor. She was standing at a turn in the stair, regarding me attentively. I rose, and she came on up.

‘I thought,’ she said without raising her eyes, ‘that I had seen you before. Have you everything you wish ?'

‘Everything except someone to talk to,’ I said.

She raised her eyes with a serious expression in them. ‘I will talk if you wish,’ she said gravely.

‘Do sit down,’ I begged.

I wished to sit down myself, for the window was low. She complied.

‘I am a friend of Mr. Heatly,’ I went on.

Her face lighted up. ‘He is a very nice man,’ she said, laughing. ‘He likes me very much. He told me he was going to look after me for the rest of my life. He makes me laugh very much. You like him?’

‘I used to be on the same ship with him,’ I said; ‘years ago, before he was married.’

‘Ah, yes, before he was married. I see. Now you go on a ship again?’

‘When she arrives from Odessa.’

‘From—’ She looked hard at me. ‘Perhaps there will be news, if she comes from Odessa.’

‘Maybe.’ (She sighed.) ‘You have had no news, then, since the Revolution?’

‘Nothing. Not one single word. In there, it is all dark. When your ship comes, there will be passengers, no?’

‘Ah, I could n’t say,’ I replied. ‘We must wait. If there are any, I will let you know.’

‘Thank you.’ Her gaze wandered across the street. ‘They have finished the play. What do you call when they sing — before?’

‘A rehearsal, you mean.’

‘Yes. Well, they have finished. There is Mephistopheles coming out now.’ She nodded toward a tall gentleman in tweeds, who was smoking a cigarette and swinging a cane on the upper terrace. ‘He waits for Margarita. There she is.’

A robust creature emerged, putting on long gloves, and the two descended to the sidewalk. Bionda laughed.

‘Does Margarita usually walk out with Mephisto?’ I asked.

‘Oh, they are married,’ she informed me with a whimsical grimace, ‘and very happy.’

‘What are you?’ I demanded abruptly. ‘Not a Slav, I am sure.’

‘Me? No, I am a Bohemian,’ she said.

‘How appropriate! How exquisitely appropriate!’ I murmured.

‘From Prague,’ she added, sighing a little.

‘An enemy?’ (She nodded.) ‘But if you will only consider yourself Czechoslovak — ’ I suggested.

She made a gesture of dissent and rose. ‘Let me know when your ship comes in,’ she said; and I promised.

Three young naval lieutenants in tennis undress came up the stairs and called for tea. The little boy came up to take their order, and I paid him and went out.

Our intimacy increased, of course, as the days passed, and I began to wonder whether or not I too was about to pass under the spell and devote my life to the amelioration of her destiny. If my ship went back to Odessa, I would be the bearer of messages, an agent of inquiry seeking news of a dim concessionnaire in the Asiatic Urals. I made extensive promises, chiefly because I was pretty sure my ship would probably go somewhere else — Bizerta or Tunis.

The simple sailor man in time develops a species of simple cunning, to protect himself from being too oppressively exploited. But it is practically impossible to rid a woman of the illusion that she is imposing upon a man. Even Emma thought it well to warn me of my danger. She heard rumors about that woman. Where had she got the money to start her tea-shop, eh? And when all the officers had gone home, where would she get customers? And so on.

These questions did not preoccupy Bionda herself, however. She was sad, but her sadness was the inevitable result of delightful memories. Her life had been full and animated; and it was only natural, since fate bad left her stranded on a pleasant island, that she should indulge her desire for retrospect before rousing to do herself full justice in the new environment. The possibility of regaining the wealth that had been lost did not seem to interest her at all. She never spoke of the expedition of Captain Gosnell and his fellow adventurers. It seemed doubtful at times whether she understood anything at all about it. A shrug, and she changed the subject.

And then one day I was stopped by two of the Russian officers as they came down the hotel stairs, and they told me they had received their orders at last. They were to report at Paris.

‘We sail to-morrow for Marseilles,’ said one; and his great spur jingled as he stamped his foot to settle it in the high boot. With much difficulty he made known their hope that I would give Madame any assistance in my power when her other friends were gone. I agreed to this with alacrity, since I myself would probably be a thousand miles away in a few weeks’ time. And the little boy? Yes, I would look after him, too.

It was the Saturday night before my ship arrived (she came in on Monday, I remember that I joined Captain Gosnell and his lieutenants at the Café de la Reine. They were exceedingly yet decorously drunk. They were to sail the next morning. They had adjourned to a small ante-room of the café, and through a closed glass door an amused public could obtain glimpses of the orgy. Captain Gosnell’s austere features had grown gradually purple; and though he never became incoherent, or even noisy, it was obvious that he had reached another psychic plane. And so there may have been a significance in the grandiose gesture with which he raised a glass of champagne and murmured, —

‘To Her, whom we all adore, who awaits — awaits our return. Our mascot. May she bring us luck!’

He sat down and looked in a puzzled way at the empty glass. He gradually drank himself sober, and helped me to get the others into a cab. Mr. Marks, his wig over one eye, snored. Heatly began to sing in the clear night, —

The cab started. As they turned the corner I heard the high, windy voice still singing, —

And then silence.

Next morning, after Early Mass, as we walked slowly up the rampe and came to a pause on the ramparts of the lower Barracca, I was curious to discover whether this departure of her champions would make any authentic impression upon her spirits.

‘Suppose,’ I was saying, ‘we had a message from Odessa, that your husband had arrived. And suppose he sent for you? Or that he had reached Paris and wanted you there?’

‘Oh, I should go, of course. It would be like life again, after being dead.’

Here was a fine state of affairs! We were all ghosts to her, phantoms inhabiting another shadowy world, cut off from life by an immense, pitiless blue sea. Compared with that distant and possibly defunct concessionnaire in the Asiatic Urals, we were all impalpable spectres! Our benevolence had about as much conscious significance for her as the sunlight upon a plant. I did not speak again until the little steamer, with a croak of her whistle, passed out between the guns of the harbor-mouth and began slowly to recede across the mighty blue floors, a great quantity of foul smoke belching from her funnel and drifting across the rocks. And then I mentioned casually what was happening — that those men were bound upon her affairs, seeking treasure at the bottom of the sea, devoted to an extravagant quest.

She made no reply. The steamer receded yet further. It became a black blob on the blue water, a blob from which smoke issued, as if it were a bomb which might explode suddenly with a tremendous detonation, and leave no trace. But Bionda’s eyes were not fixed upon the steamer. She was gazing musingly upon the great cannon frowning down from the further fortress. And after a while she sighed.

‘ Like life, after being dead! ’ she murmured again.

It was as if she had forgotten us. She was like a departed spirit, discontented with the conveniences and society of paradise, who desires to return, but dreads the journey. And it became an acute question, whether at any time she had achieved any real grasp of her position. Had she ever realized how she had inspired these men to unsuspected sentiments and released the streams of heroic energy imprisoned in their hearts? Did she suspect even for a moment how she had engaged their interest, monopolized their time, established herself in defiance of all the rules of life in the midst of their alien affection? Did she know or care how they toiled and suffered, and perhaps sinned, for her? Did she ever imagine herself as she was, not resting on the inert earth, but reclining in comfort on the taut and anxious bodies of men?

Or one may put the question this way — Does any woman?