Devil's Tor (33 page)

He loosely reviewed the whole intimacy, which, three years old, though with a great intervening gap of more than two of them, had still not lost for him its singular fascination, the magic note of which had been struck during their first fateful week together in Crete.

The famous Minoan excavations, reformative of the world's immemorial notions concerning the classical Greeks and the origins of their culture, were then yet in strong blast. The marvellous palace of Minos, claimed by some to be the temple of the Mother-Goddess herself, continued slowly to yield up the stupendous drainage and architectural feats of its construction; smaller finds continued to delight and amaze by their beauty; and history, all the time, was being rewritten. This was at Knossos, near the "wine-dark" sea running past the north coast of the island, and not far from the mass of Ida, on whose slopes legend asserted that Zeus, king of gods, was reared by his still more awful, because ancienter, mother Rhea.

Arsinal, on the strength of his known standing in archaeology and its kindred sciences, had contrived to get himself retained as volunteer assistant without pay on the working staff of the British excavating party. Occasionally he varied his locality by crossing the island to Phæstos or some other equally rich field of discoveries, but mostly he stopped at the headquarters of Knossos.

Saltfleet at about the same time was in Athens, where he had been trying to track down his whelp of a legitimate younger brother, the head of the family, the Marquis of Kirton. He seemed to have been circulating among his private set that he had the intention, or a "dashed good mind," or something of the sort, to "stop his allowance"—of course, a libel dictated by accumulated spite. In his life Saltfleet had never had a penny of allowance from him, or a penny of money from any of his decadent brood of law-recognised half-brothers and sisters. They hated him too cordially; and if ever there had been a passage of coin between them, its natural flow would have been in the reverse direction. His late father and theirs, the tenth Marquis, had left
him
most of the movable estate. To the degenerate Charles he had passed down only what it had not been in his power to withhold, namely, the northern house and land, with the title; to the rest of the scissors-jawed, puling crowd born in wedlock, pittances just big enough to keep them idle and well-dressed.

And also Saltfleet had inherited the whole fortune of his high-born Prussian mother; distinguished, aesthetic and temperamental as few but German women of rank can be, but bitterly impatient of control and convention as well, as the severe Potsdam staff-officer, her husband, had discovered to his cost in the days before the war. The Marquis was too great a personage to be reached, so, in honourable fashion, the other had put a bullet through his own brain.

Considerably moved, for he was large-hearted enough, though reckless in all things, the Marquis had then conveyed his mistress to Brazil, where they lived together for a year or two until the affair should have died down. But it was she who, from an exaggerated fastidiousness of pride, consistently declined to marry him, thinking that it would then be said of her that she had killed her husband to obtain that elevation of degree. So in Brazil Saltfleet had been born, and a summer later his mother had sickened of a fever, and passed away quite suddenly. Of course, he could remember nothing of her.

His father had brought him to England to his own mother, the old Marchioness, a grim, intrepid, opinion-scorning lady of sixty, who lived for twenty years longer, but in the end left her natural grandson nothing of her wealth, declaring that what he had already was quite sufficient for a "bastard". Nevertheless she was fond of the boy, for his promise, to the extent of soon assuming the entire responsibility for his upbringing. She had even permitted him to use the family name—before marriage, she had been the Honourable Eva Saltfleet. Her race was prouder than her husband's, if not risen so high, for whereas before the creation of the marquisate in 1745 the roots of those Desboroughs of Kirton receded quickly through knights and esquires to the unknown darkness of all common ancestry, her own paternal line ran down over lofty piers of celebrated mediaeval personages as far as Robert Guiscard, the Norman adventurer, and
his
stock.

Saltfleet, accordingly, was in Athens, for the purpose of looking up his half-brother and, should the fact be as reported to him, giving him a quiet thrashing for his lies. But Charles had gone on to Venice in a friend's yacht, and Saltfleet did not care to follow him in that geographical direction, so shrugged his shoulder and let the affair drop. A near approach to the big cities of western Europe always rather disgusted him. The business of all those swarming, crawling day-labourers was not his, nor his theirs.

Before he moved east again, however, closer to the great Asian mountains that were his eternal loadstone, a mental phenomenon overtook him that was like nothing he had ever experienced, and still it was more singular than alarming. It was a warm evening at the end of May, and he was smoking an after-dinner cigar on the outside balcony of his hotel, in company with a few groups of other people, yet very much alone, when suddenly without cause the name CRETE flashed through his head, just as distinctly as though his mouth had uttered it. Then he asked himself, hardly understanding his own question, how it would be if he took a look at Crete, seeing that he had never been there, that it was said to be very interesting, and that it was quite easy to reach from this particular capital? The suggestion was already a desire to be on the island. What had started the name and the impulse, he never knew; he had not been hearing or reading anything about the place. He decided within the minute that nothing stood in the way of packing his traps and being off to Candia by the first available transport.

Afterwards he fancied that the decision was scarcely come to when a great rushing shadow swept across his eyes, too suddenly and swiftly to grasp, and yet the impression remained with him that it had been a
woman
's
shape—or rather, a shape suggestive of the female, since it had been so vast, dark, and instantly swallowed up, that it never could have had time to look like an actual woman's.

The half-vision puzzled, yet failed to disquiet him. His health was excellent, his eyesight normal, and his nerves even robust. He had always conceded that the universe was a very queer place, full of unlighted holes and corners; so that this might quite well be a new wonder. As the invitation to Crete and the following hallucination had been so
nearly
simultaneous, evidently they were to be connected—in which case it extremely resembled a supernatural summons to the island. The notion pleased him.

After finishing his cigar quietly, he rose to get his hat, then stepped forth from the hotel for a car to Piraeus.

A trading schooner, the ultimate expression of dirt and unsailorly disorder, was to leave for Crete,
via
the Islands, at eight next morning. He was directed to the Levantine master at a neighbouring tavern by a knot of the Dago crew, found him there, an alcoholic-looking ruffian, having a countenance as craven and abject as cunning, and, plying him with a few drinks, finally succeeded in obtaining a passage in his disreputable tub for something less than the first-class fare for the distance in any liner. The cheat he ignored by virtue of his grown antipathy to the fashionable hotel life of those elaborate steamships. He preferred travelling
en
prince
with human scum to associating on enforced level terms with the dragged-up western mob having money in pocket.

Landed at Candia, after a surfeit of oily diet and discomfort of the sea, he soon learnt that all the talk there was of Knossos and the antique marvels of the island still daily being unearthed. Already Crete was a little Egypt, it seemed; only hitherto it had been insufficiently advertised. Money was wanted. Next day he went to Knossos, which was but a few miles inland, and there met Arsinal.

There had been no rushing towards one another of attuned natures, but the development of an intimacy had been rather slower than might have been expected in so friendly, isolated and purposeful a camp, by reason of the two circumstances that Saltfleet himself was always as a haughty cliff overseeing the flats of the human race, and that Arsinal, a reserved, unassuming, yet oddly noticeable man, was too engrossed by his work and musings to pay at the beginning any special attention to the big tourist of curiosity taking a view of their hive. But Saltfleet, making Candia his headquarters, after the second day amongst those ant-like toilers, had begun to mark out his quarry. The rest appeared so universally interested in their treasure-hunt, as though they had been boy scouts playing with the utmost seriousness a game of make-believe—always cheerful, industrious, welcoming with an equal welcome whatsoever might turn up—whereas Arsinal, by contrast, came to strike him as being upon the spot for a specific purpose, distinct from the long ideal of those others of recovering piecemeal in order to reconstruct a buried civilisation. That they were skilled, patient, persistent beings, knowing their trade, Saltfleet was prepared to acknowledge. Arsinal, however, had that different mien of one not burrowing at large, but meditatively watching and waiting for the emergence of some expected particular thing; which necessarily invested him for his silent witness with the moral advantage always, if irrationally, associated with the pursuit of personal aims.

He discreetly interrogated the entirely courteous and affable acting-director of operations, and from him learnt that the individual of his notice was regarded quite as a free-lance, with liberty of coming and going, as of taking as much or as little hand in the excavations as he pleased, subject, of course, to the usual reticences outside. Such privileges could not decently be withheld. He was one of the big men of archæology; with the standard that belonged to that rank. He was there (he fancied) for a particular detail of information, which, however, remained his own secret. There was no question of his being an unauthorised reporter for the Press or the societies. So far as the acting-director knew, Arsinal had never written a public paragraph, or read a paper, in his life. Personally he was not very well acquainted with the man. Saltfleet gathered that his informant's attitude was one of slightly peevish toleration.

He came to speech with Arsinal himself for the first time on the third evening after his arrival. The active disinterring of the past had sufficiently interested him to make him decide to stay on so long. His mountaineering name was his passport to the acting chief, who, indeed, seemed to feel a pleasure in explaining things to him. Arsinal, on the evening in question, was standing in the dusk, contemplating the now obscured valley at the foot of Knossos, from the height above the latter; and there the visitor to the camp had chanced to mount to him, certainly with no expectation or wish of encountering him. But naturally words must pass. After the first involuntary movements of rather vexed surprise on both their parts—for the evening was very fair and apt for solitude—they had perforce to exchange nods, whereupon a spell of stiff silence ensued; when Arsinal, still under reluctance, and with that strange absent half-yearning look that made him frequently seem either a saint or an innocent, inquired:

"You are really entering into all this?"

"In a very qualified way, and with a pretty complete ignorance!" returned Saltfleet, smiling. "The excellent Professor has done what he can to put matters in a nutshell for me, but I fear I am still quite hazy about his famous three divisions, and three sub-divisions of each, of Minoan history. The scheme is rather too incredibly mathematical for my practical knowledge of how human affairs go. … And then, to accept his word for these nine periods, I am exceedingly at sea concerning the contemporary outside world for each. You assume fourteen hundred years for the whole Minoan empire. That gives you a century and a half for each period. During the entire time, Crete must have run up against Egypt, Babylon, Troy, Athens, Israel, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, the Philistines. Now, to me it is all a welter. I have no dates. … I mean this. To comprehend the globe at any given age, we first have to regard its skeleton, its broad outline, the nations preeminent, their political aims and interactions. Without all that, we cannot descend to individuals. Well, it is precisely all that, that your chief is very vague about. His nine periods seem to be based on the exceedingly precarious evidence of pots and vases. A future expert may arise to declare that on the contrary such-and-such is the case. So that, altogether, it is too theoretical for a plain person such as I."

Arsinal smiled in turn.

"An archaeologist goes forward on his hands and knees, you must realise. The history is being pieced together too, though slowly." He gestured with a hand towards the nearly invisible palace beneath. "And it is always the glory of these people that they are enthusiastic to spend themselves for the most doubtful chance of any important step forward at all. Here, in Crete, for instance, probably the whole of the historical record was delivered to parchment or wax, which would have been destroyed by fire at the great final downfall of the empire, at the hands of barbarous northern invaders. What record does survive, in the form of inscriptions on clay, is believed to consist merely of civic inventories, etc. The inscriptions are not yet read; but should that prove to be so, put yourself in our position, Mr. Saltfleet."

"Pardon me, but I fancy you aren't quite in the same gallery!"

"How do you mean?"

"You have impressed me as being a trifle less keen than the others here, that is all."

"Perhaps less generally keen."

Saltfleet's eye fixed him through the dusk.

"More expectant, at a venture."

"Of what?"

"My dear man, how do I know? ... Presumably, of some-thing being unearthed which is to confirm some notion of yours."

"But so are they all expectant. Expectancy is the soul and life of the working archaeologist."