Captain macedoines daughter

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Captain macedoines daughter

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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Captain Macedoine's Daughter, by William McFee This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Captain Macedoine's Daughter Author: William McFee Release Date: April 18, 2010 [EBook #32042] Language: English *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER *** Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER By William McFee Author of "ALIENS", "CASUALS OF THE SEA", "LETTERS FROM AN OCEAN TRAMP," "PORT SAID MISCELLANY" Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1920 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN "It is an amiable but disastrous illusion on the part of the western nations that they have created a monopoly in freedom and truth and the right conduct of life."—Mr Spenlove TO PAULINE CONTENTS DEDICATORY CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX DEDICATORY There is an hour or so before the train comes puffing round the curve of the Gulf from Cordelio, and you are gone down into the garden for a while because the mosquitoes become tiresome later, and the great shadows of the cypresses are vanishing as the sun sinks behind the purple islands beyond the headlands You will stay there for a while among the roses and jasmine, and then you will come in and say: "There it is!" And together we will slip and stumble and trot down the steep hillside to the level-crossing, and we will run along to the little station, so like ours in America And when the train is come creaking and groaning and squealing to a standstill, I shall climb in, while you will stand for a moment looking You will wave as we start with the usual prodigious jerk, and then you will run back and climb up to the house again, banging the big iron gate securely shut All just as before But this time there is this difference, that I am not coming back I am ordered to return to England, and I am to sail to-morrow morning Now, as I have told you more than once, it is very difficult to know just how anything takes you because you have at your command an alluring immobility, a sort of sudden static receptiveness which is, to an Englishman, a Westerner that is, at once familiar and enigmatic And when one has informed you, distinctly if ungrammatically, in three languages, that one is going away for good, and you assume for a moment that aforementioned immobility, and murmur "C'est la guerre," I ask you, what is one to think? And perhaps you will recall that you then went on brushing your hair precisely as though I had made some banal remark about the weather A detached observer would say—"This woman has no heart She is too stupid to understand." However, as I am something more than a detached observer, I know that in spite of that gruff, laconic attitude of yours, that enigmatic immobility, you realize what this means to us, to me, to you So, while you are down in the garden, and the light is still quite good by this western window, I am writing this for you As we say over in America, "Let me tell you something." I have written a book, and I am dedicating it to you As you are aware, I have written books before When I explained this to you you were stricken with that sudden silence, that attentive seriousness, if you remember, and regarded me for a long time without making any remark Well, another one is done and I inscribe it to you Of course I know perfectly well that books are nothing to you, that you read only the perplexing and defaced human hieroglyphics around you I know that when you receive a copy of this new affair, through the British Post Office in the Rue Franque, you will not read it You will lay it carefully in a drawer, and let it go at that And knowing this, and without feeling sad about it, either, since I have no fancy for bookish women, I am anxious that you should read at least the dedication So I am writing it here by the window, hurriedly, in words you will understand, and I shall leave it on the table, and you will find it later, when I am gone Listen The fact is, this dedication, like the book which follows after it, is not merely an act of homage It is a symbol of emancipation from an influence under which I have lived for two thirds of your lifetime I must tell you that I have always been troubled by visions of beings whom I call dream-women I was a solitary child Girls were disconcerting creatures who revealed to me only the unamiable sides of their natures But I discovered that I possessed the power of inventing women who, while they only dimly resembled the neighbours, and acquired a few traits from the illustrations in books, were none the less extraordinarily real, becoming clearly visualized, living in my thoughts, drawing sustenance from secret sources, and inspiring me with a suspicion, never reaching expression, that they were really aspects of myself—what I would have been if, as I sometimes heard near relatives regret, I had been born a girl And later, when I was a youth, and began to go out into the world, all those vague imaginings crystallized into a definite conception She was everything I disliked—a tiny, slender creature with pale golden hair and pathetic blue eyes, and in my dreams she was always clinging to me, which I detested I regarded myself with contempt for remaining preoccupied with a fancy so alien to my temperament You might suppose that an image inspiring such antagonism would soon fade On the contrary, she assumed a larger and larger dominion over my imagination I fancied myself married to her, and for days the spell of such a dire destiny made me ill It was summer time, and I lived on the upper floor of my mother's house in an outlying faubourg of London, from the windows of which one could look across a wide wooded valley or down into the secluded gardens of the surrounding villas And one evening I happened to look down and I saw, between the thickly clothed branches of the lime-trees, the woman of my dreams sitting in a neighbour's garden, nursing a baby, and rocking herself to and fro while she turned her childish features and pale blue eyes toward the house with an expectant smile I sat at my window looking at this woman, some neighbour's recently married daughter no doubt, my thoughts in a flurry of fear, for she was just as I had imagined her I wonder if I can make you understand that I did not want to imagine her at all, that I was helpless in the grip of my forebodings? For in the dream it was I who would come out of the drawing-room door on to the lawn, who would advance in an alpaca coat, put on after my return from business, a gold watch-chain stretched athwart my stomach, carpet slippers on my soft, untravelled feet, and would bend down to that clinging form As I have told you, it was about that time that I left the faubourgs and went to live in a studio among artists Without knowing it, I took the most certain method of depriving that woman of her power Beyond the shady drives and prim gardens of the faubourg her image began to waver, and she haunted my dreams no more And I was glad of this because at that time I was an apprentice to Life, and there were so many things at which I wanted to try my hand that I had not time for what is known, rather vaguely, as love and romance and sentiment and so forth I resented the intrusion of these sensuous phantoms upon the solitudes where I was struggling with the elementary rules of art I was consumed with an insatiable ambition to write, to read, to travel, to talk, to achieve distinction And curiously, I had an equally powerful instinct to make myself as much like other young men, in manner and dress and ideas, as possible I was ashamed of my preoccupation with these creatures of my imagination, believing them peculiar to myself, and I hurried from them as one hurries from shabby relations But before I was aware of it I had fallen into the toils of another dream-woman, an experienced, rapacious, and disdainful woman I saw her in studios, where she talked without noticing me save out of the corner of her eye I saw her at picture exhibitions, where she stood regarding the pictures satirically, speaking rapidly and disparagingly from between small white teeth and holding extravagant furs about her thin form I had a notion, too, that she was married, and I waited in a temper of mingled pride, disgust, and fortitude for her to appear in the body And then things began to happen to me with bewildering rapidity In the space of a week I fell in love, I lost my employment, and I ran away to sea Now it is of no importance to you what my employment was or how I lost it Neither are you deeply interested in that sea upon which I spend my days, and which is to bear me away from you to-morrow You come of inland stock, and the sea-coast of Bohemia, a coast of fairy lights and magic casements, is more in your way But I know without asking that you will be eager to hear about the falling in love Indeed this is the point of the story The point is that an average young Englishman, as I was then, may quite possibly live and prosper and die, without ever getting to know anything about love at all! I told you this once, and you observed "My God! Impossible." And you added thoughtfully: "The Englishwomen—perhaps it is their fault." Well, it may be their fault, or the fault of their climate, which washes the vitality out of one, or of their religion, which does not encourage emotional adventure to any notable degree The point is that the average young Englishman is more easily fooled about love than about anything else in the world He accepts almost any substitute offered to him in an attractive package I know this because I was an average young Englishman and I was extensively fooled about love The whole social fabric of English life is engaged in manufacturing spurious counterfeits of the genuine article And I fell, as we say in America, for a particularly cheap imitation called Ideal Love Now you must not imagine that, because I had, as I say, fallen in love with Ideal Love, I was therefore free from the dream-woman of whom I have spoken Not at all She hovered in my thoughts and complicated my emotions But I can hear you saying: "Never mind the dream-woman Tell me about the real one, your ideal." Well, listen She was small, thin, and of a dusky pallor, and her sharp, clever features were occasionally irradiated with a dry, satirical smile that had the cold, gleaming concentration of the beam of a searchlight She had a large number of accomplishments, a phrase we English use in a most confusing sense, since she had never accomplished anything and never would But the ideal part of her lay in her magnificent conviction that she and her class were the final embodiment of desirable womanhood It was not she whom I loved Indeed she was a rather disagreeable girl with a mania for using men's slang which she had picked up from college-boys It was this ideal of English womanhood which deluded me, and which scared me for many years from examining her credentials That is what it amounted to For years after I had discovered that she thought me beneath her because I was not a college-boy, she continued to impose her personality upon me Whenever I imagined for a moment that I might love some other kind of woman, I would see that girl's disparaging gray eyes regarding me with an attentive, satirical smile And this obsession appeared to my befuddled mentality as a species of sacrifice I imagined that I was remaining true to my Ideal! If you demand where I obtained these ideas, I can only confess that I had read of such sterile allegiances in books, and I had not yet abandoned the illusion that life was to be learned from literature, instead of literature from life And, moreover, although we are accustomed to assume that all young men have a natural aptitude for love, I think myself that it is not so; that we have to acquire, by long practice and thought, the ability and the temperament to achieve anything beyond tawdry intrigues and banal courtships, spurious imitations which are exhibited and extensively advertised as the real thing 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 I would almost say it requires as much talent as a work of art; indeed, the passion, the idea, and the work of art are really only three manifestations, three dimensions, of the same emotion And the simple and sufficient reason why this book should be dedicated to you is, that but for you it would not have been written And very often, I think, women marry men simply to keep them from ever encountering passion Englishwomen especially They are afraid of it They think it wicked So they marry him Though they suspect that he will be able to sustain it when he has gotten more experience, they know that they themselves will never be the objects of it, so they trick him with one of the clever imitations I have mentioned Everything is done to keep out the woman who can inspire an authentic passion And the act of duping him is invariably attributed to what is called the mothering instinct, a craving to protect a young man from his natural destiny, the great adventure of life! However, after a number of years of sea-faring, during which I was obsessed by this sterile allegiance, and permitted many interesting possibilities to pass me without investigating them, I was once more in London, in late autumn I call this sort of fidelity sterile because it is static, whereas all genuine emotion is dynamic—a species of growth And I realized that beneath my conventional desire to see her again lay a reluctance to discover my folly But convention was too strong for me, and by a fairly easy series of charitable arrangements I met her And it was at a picture-show I remember pondering upon this accident of

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  • CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER

  • Author of "ALIENS", "CASUALS OF THE SEA", "LETTERS FROM AN OCEAN TRAMP," "PORT SAID MISCELLANY"

    • Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1920

      • ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

      • TO PAULINE

  • CONTENTS

  • DEDICATORY

  • CAPTAIN MACEDOINE'S DAUGHTER

  • CHAPTER I

  • CHAPTER II

  • CHAPTER III

  • CHAPTER IV

  • CHAPTER V

  • CHAPTER VI

  • CHAPTER VII

  • CHAPTER VIII

  • CHAPTER IX

    • THE END

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