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.