William McFee

“ I'm inclined to believe the origin of love is as obscure as that of life itself. I put the thought into words, because at that moment, with that girl beside me, with the whole mundane contraption of existence obliterated by a damp, foggy darkness, with the moisture dripping hurriedly from invisible trees, and the immediate future rendered ominous by Captain Macedoine's remarks, I felt a conviction that I was closer to the solution of the problem than I had ever been before. ”

“ I had always held the theory that no married woman could be an absolute fool. It had seemed to me that such contact with the realities of life as marriage involved must leave some austere mark of intelligence, some tinge of altruism, upon the most superficial. She seemed to disprove this. For her the world did not exist save for the 'angel child.' Even her husband was now only the nearly indispensable producer of income. She talked, not of him, or of her family, not of Art or Life or Death or the world to come, not even of Home or the things she had seen in Alexandria. ”

“ With more experience of the world of sentiment I might possibly have gone so far as to envisage the probable outcome of the adventure. But the point is that for all my thirty-five years, I had no such experience at all. And women are quick as lightning to perceive this. You can bring them nothing which they prize with such tender solicitude as a mature and inexperienced heart. Neither callow adolescence nor a smart worldly knowledge of their own weaknesses is any match for it. And why? Well, I imagine it is because they feel safe without losing any of the perilous glamour of love. ”

“ You forget that ninety-nine sailor-men out of each hundred feed themselves exclusively on dreams. You are like the donkey who imagines he sees a resplendent carrot hung in front of him. It is not only that he never gets the carrot. There never was any carrot for him to get. I repeat—dear old Jack Evans was not a bit singular in his illusions, any more than Captain Macedoine was in his. ”

“ I was musing thus as the platoons of ragged revolutionaries shuffled past, when I found myself gazing at M. Nikitos, seated with crossed legs in the corner of a shabby one-horse carriage, and raising an unpleasant-looking silk hat. He was, I take it, one of the secretaries of the Committee of Liberty and Progress, possibly their future international expert. It suddenly occurred to me that there is a gigantic brotherhood in the world, a brotherhood of those who have never willingly done a day's work in their lives and never intend to. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And again, while it may be true, as La Rochefoucauld declares in his "Maxims"—the thin book you have so often found by my chair in the garden—that a woman is in love with her first lover, and ever after is in love with love, it seems to me that with men the reverse is true. We spend years in falling in and out of love with love. The woman is only a lay figure whom we invest with the vague splendours of our snobbish and inexperienced imagination. A great passion demands as much knowledge and experience and aptitude as a great idea. ”

“ Circe should be painted with her eyes fixed in severe meditation, oblivious of the grunting, squeaking beasts around her. Artemisia was like that. She really cared nothing for the ridiculous performances of the various animals on the ship. Nothing for the magniloquent Mr. Basil Bloom, clearing his throat behind his dirty hand; nothing for the Second Mate, with his perpetual expression of knowing something about her and being mightily amused by it. Nothing even for poor young Siddons, badly hit, moping out of sight, heaving prodigious sighs and getting wiggings for being absent-minded. ”

“ Jack once muttered to me that she'd 'knock the men over' and he seemed to take a certain grim relish in contemplating the future overthrow of the love-sick swains. And I saw in the background of this vision, as one sees a pale bluish shadow of a form in the background of a bright, highly coloured portrait, I saw Mrs. Evans, shrinking as the angel child developed, and cowering before that nonchalant vampirism. A well-nourished young cannibal, I figure her, for such characters need human beings for their sustenance, if you take the trouble to observe their habits. ”

“ I stepped into that long, narrow affair, with its tall, gondola-like prow and absurd brass balls, and I left my youth behind on the hollow-sounding boards of that jetty. No, there is nothing to laugh at in a man of thirty-five leaving his youth behind. There are men who have seen their own daughters married, and retain for themselves the hearts of adventurous boys. From the formidable ramparts of half a century they can leap down and frolic with the young fellows who for the first time are in love, or seeing the world, or holding down a job, or reading Balzac. I cannot compete with such men. ”

“ It is strange enough to meet a person after many years; stranger still to meet one who has made a powerful yet unsympathetic impression upon you—to meet him with all your old dislikes and prejudices washed to a clear and colourless curiosity. But to see such a man as I saw Captain Macedoine, afar off, through an atmosphere charged with the electric blue radiance of moonlight, moving in an alien orbit, animated by unknown emotions—why, it was like seeing a man who was dead and gone to another world! ”

“ Jack's words about pulling off to the buoys had recalled me to a sense of serious responsibility. One always had that hanging over one while in Ipsilon. Grünbaum, from his secure fastness under the mountain, was familiar with the incalculable treachery of the wind and sea.
"I was soon far above the habitation of men. Above me slanted the masses of weathered limestone and marble; below, reduced to the size of a child's toy, I could see the Manola. At intervals I could hear a faint rattle and another cloud of red dust would rise from her deck, like the smoke of a bombardment. ”

“ I was overwhelmed with the hard, gritty facts of existence, an existence the most discouraging and drab on earth I imagine, unless one has some fine romantic ideal before one. And I stood there, irresolute, looking at my figure in the glass, which reminded me of a badly painted ancestral portrait, and wondered whether I was capable of a fine romantic ideal. There lies the trouble with most of us, I fancy. We lose our youth and we fail to lay hold of the resolution of manhood. And before we know it we have drifted moodily into forlorn by-ways of sensuality.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ Macedoine and his lieutenant devising fantastic skin-games to be played out among the haunts of the old Cabirian gods; Artemisia fighting her own sad little battle with the fates and steeling her soul with reckless resolutions; even old Jack, no bad prototype of the ancient ship-masters who ran their battered biremes up on yonder beach to mend their storm-strained gear—all were more or less congruous with this old Isle of Ipsilon, where Perseus grew to manhood and from whose shores he set out on his journey to find Medusa. ”

“ An artificial story, if you like, as everything about Captain Macedoine was artificial. It was almost as if he had achieved his destiny by coming at last to that extraordinary concoction of artificialities which we call New Orleans, where dead civilizations lie superimposed one upon the other like leaves in a rotten old book, where you can cut down through them, from the mail-steamer and the trolley-car and the fake religion, right down to the poisonous swamp and the Voodoo frenzy. ”

“ It was plain that Artemisia would develop into one of those women who waste no time over dunderheads. When I said, reasonably enough, for she wore a wedding ring, 'Then you are not really married?' she clicked her tongue against her teeth and shrugged her shoulders. Oh, she was practising on me! I could see that. She thought, I suppose, that I was proof against her; but how she would have tortured young Siddons, for example, in love with her, young, sensitive, chivalrous, full of faith in the nobility of womanhood. Yes, Kinaitsky understood. He knew women. ”

“ For I liked him, and we are always afraid of those whom we like. It is not only that we fear to tarnish our own reputation in their eyes, but we suffer a mingled terror and pleasure lest we discover them to be unworthy of their exalted position in our affections. So I got up and instead of knocking at the door I stepped among the shrubs and came to the window. And sitting close against the wall, with a small table in front of him and his head on his hand, sat Captain Macedoine. ”

“ Spenlove, seated on the extreme edge of his little deck-stool, his knees out, his hands lightly inserted in his trouser pockets, paused again in his narrative and looked over his shoulder as the quartermaster at the gangway rang four bells. The moon was gone behind the vast mass of rock which had been used by him as a material background to the fantastic tale he was telling in his own introspective and irritating manner. Out beyond the sharp black silhouette of the headland the open water was a dazzling glitter that contrasted oddly with the profound obscurity of the tiny haven. ”

“ And the trouble with us is that we are usually unable to make out a very strong case for our side of the question. We point with a fine gesture toward the severely beautiful figure of Virtue, and the woman, following our instructions, looks and sees Mrs. Evans and the angel child. We point ecstatically to Love, and she shrugs her shoulders as the figure of young Siddons emerges, with his boyish mind choked with racial and social prejudices, his muzzy, impossible idealism, and his empty purse. ”

“ I am not afraid of women, but I regard their lairs with considerable trepidation. On board an old tramp steamer a woman is nothing less than a scourge. There is no place for her, and consequently you never know where you may find her. If you walk to and fro on the deck, you are probably keeping her awake. If you go out on deck in your shirt-sleeves, or come from a bath with a towel round you, you are outraging her modesty. If you use the ordinary jargon of the sea, she writes home that the engineers are awfully coarse on her husband's ship. ”