Banat walked slowly over to the bar.
“Bon soir, Monsieur,”
said Mr. Kuvetli.
“Bon soir.”
It was grunted almost inaudibly as if he were anxious not to commit himself to accepting something he did not want. He reached the bar and murmured something to the steward.
He had passed close to Madame Mathis and Graham saw her frown. Then he himself caught the smell of scent. It was attar of roses and very strong. He remembered
Colonel Haki’s question as to whether he had noticed any perfume in his room at the Adler-Palace after the attacks. Here was the explanation. The man reeked of scent. The smell of it would stay with the things he touched.
“Are you going far, Monsieur?” said Mr. Kuvetli.
The man eyed him. “No. Genoa.”
“It is a beautiful city.”
Banat turned without answering to the drink the steward had poured out for him. He had not once looked at Graham.
“You are not looking well,” said Josette severely. “I do not think you are sincere when you say that you are only tired.”
“You are tired?” said Mr. Kuvetli in French. “Ah, it is my fault. Always with ancient monuments it is necessary to walk.” He seemed to have given Banat up as a bad job.
“Oh, I enjoyed the walk.”
“It is the ventilation,” Madame Mathis repeated stubbornly.
“There
is,”
conceded her husband, “a certain stuffiness.” He addressed himself very pointedly to exclude José from his audience. “But what can one expect for so little money?”
“So little!” exclaimed José. “That is very good. It is quite expensive enough for me. I am not a millionaire.”
Mathis flushed angrily. “There are more expensive ways of travelling from Istanbul to Genoa.”
“There is always a more expensive way of doing anything,” retorted José.
Josette said quickly: “My husband always exaggerates.”
“Travelling is very expensive to-day,” pronounced Mr. Kuvetli.
“But …”
The argument rambled on, pointless and stupid; a mask for the antagonism between José and the Mathis. Graham listened with half his mind. He knew that sooner or later Banat must look at him and he wanted to see that look. Not that it would tell him anything that he did not already know, but he wanted to see it just the same. He could look at Mathis and yet see Banat out of the corner of his eye. Banat raised the glass of brandy to his lips and drank some of it; then, as he put the glass down, he looked directly at Graham.
Graham leaned back in his chair.
“… but,” Mathis was saying, “compare the service one receives. On the train there is a
couchette
in a compartment with others. One sleeps—perhaps. There is waiting at Belgrade for the coaches from Bucharest and at Trieste for the coaches from Budapest. There are passport examinations in the middle of the night and terrible food in the day. There is the noise and there is the dust and soot. I cannot conceive …”
Graham drained his glass. Banat was inspecting him: secretly, as the hangman inspects the man whom he is to execute the following morning; mentally weighing him, looking at his neck, calculating the drop.
“Travelling is very expensive to-day,” said Mr. Kuvetli again.
At that moment the dinner gong sounded. Banat put
his glass down and went out of the room. The Mathis followed. Graham saw that Josette was looking at him curiously. He got to his feet. There was a smell of food coming from the kitchen. The Italian woman and her son came in and sat down at the table. The thought of food made him feel ill.
“You are sure you feel well?” said Josette as they went to the dinner tables. “You do not look it.”
“Quite sure.” He cast about desperately for something else to say and uttered the first words that came into his head: “Madame Mathis is right. The ventilation is not good. Perhaps we could walk on deck after dinner is over.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Ah, now I know that you cannot be well! You are polite. But very well, I will go with you.”
He smiled fatuously, went on to his table, and exchanged reserved greetings with the two Italians. It was not until he sat down that he noticed that an extra place had been laid beside them.
His first impulse was to get up and walk out. The fact that Banat was on the ship was bad enough: to have to eat at the same table would be intolerable. But everything depended upon his behaving normally. He would
have
to stay. He must try and think of Banat as Monsieur Mavrodopoulos, a Greek business man, whom he had never seen or heard of before. He must …
Haller came in and sat down beside him. “Good evening, Mr. Graham. And did you enjoy Athens this afternoon?”
“Yes, thanks. Mr. Kuvetli was suitably impressed.”
“Ah, yes, of course. You were doing duty as a guide. You must be feeling tired.”
“To tell you the truth, my courage failed me. I hired a car. The chauffeur did the guiding. As Mr. Kuvetli speaks fluent Greek, the whole thing went off quite satisfactorily.”
“He speaks Greek and yet he has never been to Athens?”
“It appears that he was born in Smyrna. Apart from that, I regret to say, I discovered nothing. My own private opinion is that he is a bore.”
“That is disappointing. I had hopes … However, it cannot be helped. To tell you the truth, I wished afterwards that I had come with you. You went up to the Parthenon, of course.”
“Yes.”
Haller smiled apologetically. “When you reach my age you sometimes think of the approach of death. I thought this afternoon how much I would have liked to have seen the Parthenon just once more. I doubt if I shall have another opportunity of doing so. I used to spend hours standing in the shade by the Propylæa looking at it and trying to understand the men who built it. I was young then and did not know how difficult it is for Western man to understand the dream-heavy classical soul. They are so far apart. The god of superlative shape has been replaced by the god of superlative force and between the two conceptions there is all space. The destiny idea symbolised by the Doric columns is incomprehensible to the children of Faust. For us …” He broke off. “Excuse me. I see that we have another passenger,
I suppose that he is to sit here.”
Graham forced himself to look up.
Banat had come in and was standing looking at the tables. The steward, carrying plates of soup, appeared behind him and motioned him towards the place next to the Italian woman. Banat approached, looked round the table, and sat down. He nodded to them, smiling slightly.
“Mavrodopoulos,” he said.
“Je parle français un petit peu.”
His voice was toneless and husky and he spoke with a slight lisp. The smell of attar of roses came across the table.
Graham nodded distantly. Now that the moment had come he felt quite calm.
Haller’s look of strangled disgust was almost funny. He said pompously: “Haller. Beside you are Signora and Signor Beronelli. This is Monsieur Graham.”
Banat nodded to them again and said: “I have travelled a long way to-day. From Salonika.”
Graham made an effort. “I should have thought,” he said, “that it would have been easier to go to Genoa by train from Salonika.” He felt oddly breathless as he said it and his voice sounded strange in his own ears.
There was a bowl of raisins in the centre of the table and Banat put some in his mouth before replying. “I don’t like trains,” he said shortly. He looked at Haller. “You are a German, Monsieur?”
Haller frowned. “I am.”
“It is a good country, Germany.” He turned his attention to Signora Beronelli. “Italy is good, too.” He took some more raisins.
The woman smiled and inclined her head. The boy looked angry.
“And what,” said Graham, “do you think about England?”
The small tired eyes stared into his coldly. “I have never seen England.” The eyes wandered away round the table. “When I was last in Rome,” he said, “I saw a magnificent parade of the Italian army with guns and armoured cars and aeroplanes.” He swallowed his raisins. “The aeroplanes were a great sight and made one think of God.”
“And why should they do that, Monsieur?” demanded Haller. Evidently he did not like Monsieur Mavrodopoulos.
“They made one think of God. That is all I know. You feel it in the stomach. A thunderstorm makes one think of God, too. But these aeroplanes were better than a storm. They shook the air like paper.”
Watching the full self-conscious lips enunciating these absurdities, Graham wondered if an English jury, trying the man for murder, would find him insane. Probably not: he killed for money; and the Law did not think that a man who killed for money was insane. And yet he
was
insane. His was the insanity of the sub-conscious mind running naked, of the “throw back,” of the mind which could discover the majesty of God in thunder and lightning, the roar of bombing planes, or the firing of a five hundred pound shell; the awe-inspired insanity of the primæval swamp. Killing, for this man,
could
be a business. Once, no doubt, he had been surprised that people should be prepared to pay so handsomely for the doing
of something they could do so easily for themselves. But, of course, he would have ended by concluding, with other successful business men, that he was cleverer than his fellows. His mental approach to the business of killing would be that of the lavatory attendant to the business of attending to his lavatories or of the stockbroker towards the business of taking his commission: purely practical.
“Are you going to Rome now?” said Haller politely. It was the heavy politeness of an old man with a young fool.
“I go to Genoa,” said Banat.
“I understand,” said Graham, “that the thing to see at Genoa is the cemetery.”
Banat spat out a raisin seed. “That is so? Why?” Obviously, that sort of remark was not going to disconcert him.
“It is supposed to be very large, very well arranged, and planted with very fine cypresses.”
“Perhaps I shall go.”
The waiter brought soup. Haller turned rather ostentatiously to Graham and began once more to talk about the Parthenon. It seemed that he liked arranging his thoughts aloud. The resultant monologue demanded practically nothing of the listener but an occasional nod. From the Parthenon he wandered to pre-Hellenic remains, the Aryan hero tales, and the Vedic religion. Graham ate mechanically, listened, and watched Banat. The man put his food in his mouth as if he enjoyed it. Then, as he chewed, he would look round the room like a dog over a plate of scraps. There was something pathetic
about him. He was—Graham realised it with a shock—pathetic in the way that a monkey, in its likeness to man, could be pathetic. He was not insane. He was an animal and dangerous.
The meal came to an end. Haller, as usual, went to his wife. Thankful for the opportunity, Graham left at the same time, got his overcoat, and went out on deck.
The wind had dropped and the roll of the ship was long and slow. She was making good speed and the water sliding along her plates was hissing and bubbling as if they were red hot. It was a cold, clear night.
The smell of attar of roses was at the back of his throat and in his nostrils. He drew the fresh unscented air into his lungs with conscious pleasure. He was, he told himself, over the first hurdle. He had sat face to face with Banat and talked to him without giving himself away. The man could not possibly suspect that he was known and understood. The rest of it would be easy. He had only to keep his head.
There was a step behind him and he swung round quickly, his nerves jumping.
It was Josette. She came towards him smiling. “Ah! So this is your politeness. You ask me to walk with you, but you do not wait for me. I have to find you. You are very bad.”
“I’m sorry. It was so stuffy in the saloon that …”
“It is not at all stuffy in the saloon, as you know perfectly well.” She linked her arm in his. “Now we will walk and you shall tell me what is
really
the matter.”
He looked at her quickly. “What is
really
the matter! What do you mean?”
She became the
grande dame
. “So you are not going to tell me. You will not tell me how you came to be on this ship. You will not tell me what has happened to-day to make you so nervous.”
“Nervous! But …”
“Yes, Monsieur Graham, nervous!” She abandoned the
grande dame
with a shrug. “I am sorry but I have seen people who are afraid before. They do not look at all like people who are tired or people who feel faint in a stuffy room. They have a special look about them. Their faces look very small and grey round the mouth and they cannot keep their hands still.” They had reached the stairs to the boat deck. She turned and looked at him. “Shall we go up?”
He nodded. He would have nodded if she had suggested that they jump overboard. He could think of only one thing. If
she
knew a frightened man when she saw one, then so did Banat. And if Banat had noticed.… But he couldn’t have noticed. He couldn’t. He …
They were on the boat deck now and she took his arm again.
“It is a very nice night,” she said. “I am glad that we can walk like this. I was afraid this morning that I had annoyed you. I did not really wish to go to Athens. That officer who thinks he is so nice asked me to go with him but I did not. But I would have gone if you had asked me. I do not say that to flatter you. I tell you the truth.”
“It’s very kind of you,” he muttered.
She mimicked him. “ ‘It’s very kind of you.’ Ah, you are so solemn. It is as if you did not like me.”
He managed to smile. “Oh, I like you, all right.”
“But you do not trust me? I understand. You see me dancing in Le Jockey Cabaret and you say, because you are so experienced: ‘Ah! I must be careful of this lady.’ Eh? But I am a friend. You are so silly.”
“Yes, I am silly.”
“But you
do
like me?”
“Yes, I like you.” A stupid, fantastic suggestion was taking root in his mind.
“Then you must trust me, also.”
“Yes, I must.” It was absurd, of course. He couldn’t trust her. Her motives were as transparent as the day. He couldn’t trust anybody. He was alone; damnably alone. If he had someone to talk to about it, it wouldn’t be so bad. Now supposing Banat had seen that he was nervous and concluded that he was on his guard. Had he or hadn’t he seen? She could tell him that.