Lewis and Irene

PART ONE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
PART TWO
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
PART THREE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII

PART ONE

The morning papers predicted mist with occasional showers from the Atlantic. In spite of this the morning presented a cloudless sky, though it had been a little late in producing it. The Paris sycamores persisted in their homage to the autumn; hardly were their leaves swept up than it had to be done again.

"Fifteen and fifteen, thirty," went on Lewis, catching sight of a beautiful outward curling beard which came to join the imperial of his next-door neighbour, the general, each of whose statements began with the expression: "Upon my soul and honour ...!"

It was the first funeral since the return from the holidays. Nobody had yet had time to get back their pallor; from starched collars and mourning dresses protruded the tanned cheeks and sunburnt hands of the congregation.

Whilst the black-moustached undertaker's men were emptying the contents of the hearse on to the bier and carrying the be-ribboned wreaths and other floral expressions of regret one by one into the church, the organ, like a concertina in the hands of some inebriated and tearful sailor, sent its gigantic windy harmonies soaring amongst the church hangings, beneath the vaulted roof and right out into the street. The beadles with their glittering halberds pierced like absinthe spoons, towered above all the bald heads. The footmen of the deceased, in their amethystine livery, and holding their top-hats in their hands, added to the majesty of the scene. One felt that the least touch of sorrow would have impaired and the least incivility have shattered the good humour of this obscure gathering of men and women in their common enjoyment of the taste of the morning, of toothpaste and of not being dead.

It was the new game of "Beaver," popular that summer in England, which Lewis, an anglomaniac Frenchman, had imported into France. A society game. Each beard met with, or caught sight of, counted one point: the same scoring as at lawn tennis, fifteen, thirty, forty and game. The winner was the man who saw the greatest number of beards first. It was played at Ascot, in the Temple, at Lords, in omnibuses. The game of "Beaver" became so intense that at a Royal Garden Party Lewis had noticed subjects of the King in whom the zest for the game outweighed the respect due to sovereigns, and who even whilst making their bow mentally credited themselves with the Royal Beard. Certain champions with a practised eye scored with incredible rapidity, even amongst crowds to all appearances clean shaven. Just think then of Sunday round the bandstands of French provincial towns where beards, perfumed with verbena or tobacco juice, are still cultivated, and where on some of the benches entire games can be won at a single stroke!

Robust and full of life, the heirs in a blaze of candle-light, the Board of Directors and all the lesser employés of the Franco-African Bank abandoned themselves to their grief. Business men embarrassed by being brought face to face with nothingness at an hour when typewriters are usually clicking; bored society people turning their backs to the altar and scanning the assembly. Everything went off in perfect order. One felt that at the hour ordained by God certain important fractions of middle-class wealth and fat dividends had slipped from the strong room of the deceased to that of the beneficiaries, without any fuss and without attracting the attention of the Treasury or the envy of subordinates. A transfer of accounts amid sobs was all that was necessary. One was reminded that a hundred years before this church of La Madeleine, in which they were, had so nearly been a bank.

"Beaver and game," said Lewis at the sudden thought that close beside him in the coffin a thick white curling beard was still sprouting. If, as happens in some countries, the corpse had lain with its face uncovered, no one could have denied Lewis a brilliant win. The dead man, Monsieur Vandémanque, had been one of those ornamental and costly old idols secured to the pediments of our financial concerns, whose number increases uselessly with the increase of capital and who are exhibited once a year before the eyes of the shareholders, whom the sight of so much age reassures instead of alarming them—heaven only knows why. One of those men who collect soup tureens of the East India Company, know the Æneid by heart, have never seen a bill of exchange, are possessed of savage vanity and greed whilst all the time morbidly grabbing their directors' fees, and appear outwardly to us as greedy children either snivelling or sucking at the shrivelled udder of their dividends in their sleep.

A picture of a majestically-robed Christ in a side window took Lewis back to his first board meeting—nearly three years before—when he had braved Monsieur Vandémanque seated in all his glory as Chairman of the Board, at the top of a green table, on a raised armchair. Above the twenty-five hairless pates (Lewis alone had black hair) allegories chased one another across the gilded panels. On the lower floors of the bank, through the thick pile carpet, the funnel-like pigeon-holes could be heard sucking slender Gallic savings into the cellars. In the old counting-house in the basement the nation's sustenance was being prepared: thrift and the love of securities seasoned with the lure of impossible dividends.

It was the culminating point of a six months' struggle, carried on by the retiring members of the board, to prevent the young Lewis from having a seat on the board when the time came for their re-election. Monsieur Vandémanque loathed this bold iconoclast with his ill-breeding, vanity and the haphazard methods of a financial dabbler.

After the reading of the directors' report, Lewis got up very sedately, and mercilessly criticized the previous year's management, particularly with regard to current accounts and the use made of the reserve, and, after casually breaking it to them that he held about three times as many shares as they imagined, announced his intention of entering a protest denouncing the resolutions submitted to the two last meetings as being irregular.

Lewis sat down in the midst of a horrified audience, composed of intelligent, respectable men, who, the associates of other respectable people, always shrank from anything crude or obvious, beneath the limp banner of the words "the correct thing."

They muttered amongst themselves:—"These young fellows must be made to fall into line."

"If that isn't enough for you, the next time I shall not come unsupported," said Lewis out loud.

He was sure of controlling the majority of shares before another year passed; and he did.

"What exactly do you intend to do?" Monsieur Vandémanque, eager for compromise, had asked, on the day when Lewis had forced himself in as general manager, nominated by the shareholders.

"Play an open game, that's all," he answered. "Pass the ball to the three-quarter line when I get it, and win the game as quickly as possible."

"To obedience or penury," answered Lewis, with his usual brutality. A year before he would not have dared talk like that.

The shock killed Monsieur Vandémanque. Six months later his high-priest's hands ceased to tremble and the veins on his forehead to bulge, and now he was lying there beneath the first chrysanthemums of the year.

Lewis, having successfully broken through that crust which our traditions and our morals pile up on youth, and having renounced the immortal principle of the commerce and the spirit of France, namely:—always be suspicious of what you are creating, had, among the first of his generation, struggled out into the open air. It enabled him to experience the obloquy that is always hurled at any form of youthful success. Exhausted France, divided between the struggle for existence and the struggle to keep up her reputation as a jealous nation, accepted his innovations with reluctance.

In one year Lewis trebled his business interests and succeeded in getting hold of the controlling number of shares. Where before everything was done clandestinely (Lewis could almost hear Monsieur Vandémanque's: "good wine needs no bush"), all business was now conducted in the full glare of publicity; whereas before only one telephone line connected the Rue Scribe with the Bourse, now there were eighteen lines devoted solely to foreign exchange dealing. Lewis was now managing the Franco-African Bank and its affiliated companies practically without control, the Ætas Assurance Company, which was expanding enormously since its new re-insurance contract with Lloyds, and the Fidius Research Corporation (chemical products, commercial rubber, phosphates, oxygen).

EVERYONE had to toil up to the Père Lachaise cemetery to be present at the funeral orations. The only part of the journey that Lewis really liked was round the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, at the sight of the negro with his gold clock in his stomach over the Nègre clock factory, of the flights of flaking steps which rose and fell like switchback railways, and in their reflections beneath the curves of the asphalt reminding him of the sloping of old market gardens; of the huge Empire houses built with the stones of the Bastille, and spattered here and there by rifle s during days when history was being made.

The hearse, behind its team of horses and the coachman in soot-black, was sheathed in a dull sombreness in which only the mouths of the horses showed as damp, pink slits. Lewis watched the setting of the swollen sun tinging the spokes of the wheels, the buckled shoes of the master of ceremonies, the transparent orchids and the autumn foliage which left the scent of damp forests behind it. Suddenly Lewis felt himself seized by the arm. He freed himself with his elbow. But whoever it was returned to the attack. So he gripped the insinuated hand and kept it a prisoner in his own.

The man whom Lewis captured was a little red-headed man with scallop-shaped whiskers spread over his cheeks. A Neapolitan of the undone-trouser kind and Paris correspondent of several papers in Southern Italy, he was an exceedingly clever go-between who had lived in Paris for several years without either making a fortune or going to prison. His name was Pastafina.

"Just now walking behind you hat in hand," said Pastafina, "I studied the shape of your head. In spite of everything you have the skull of an intelligent man; so I am going to talk seriously to you."

Signor Pastifina expressed himself with as many gestures as an Italian station master trying to make a train start (at least at the time when Italian trains never did start). Not daring to smoke openly in the procession he hid his cigarette in the palm of his hand, like sentries on duty do.

According as the quarters through which the hearse passed became poorer, the flowers covering it created more and more sensation.

"He's got a fine escort," said the costermongers, nodding at the dead man, "but he's got to go all the same."

"Listen. It's just the undertaking for a gambler, a lucky gambler. For you. I was born in Naples, but my parents were Sicilian, and I've always kept in touch with Sicily. You didn't know that? Well, what you are not unaware of is that as a result of the Visocchi Law, which applies both to the mainland and to Sicily, all large estates not under cultivation were expropriated in 1920 for the benefit of the peasants. Now I have a brother, Arsenio Pastafina, who, after prospecting in Mexico and returning ruined to his own country, became general secretary of our agricultural syndicate at San Lucido. Now follow me closely; in this Sicilian commune there was an estate of about five thousand acres belonging to the ducal family of Montecervato (a branch of the Palmi family) which was about to escheat to the State. Rather than this the owner preferred to sell it at a low price, and my brother bought it from him secretly. The property is four hours' mule ride from Caltabellotta, on the south coast; you follow a track bordered by fig-trees and those laurel trees that recall the arms of the first Siculi. Not one of your healthy-looking French roads, but one of those upward sloping southern roads covered with open sores like the back of an old donkey ..."

(What with the Château d'Eau Barracks, and the pale sun caught in the network of overhead tram wires, the Place de la République was a horrible sight. Is there anything quite so out of place as this in Paris?)

" ... sloping upwards, I say, beneath the sky transparent with heat and fringed with yellowish green on the horizon. You might almost think that there was already sulphur in the air. In the distance smoke rises from some sacrifice, one knows not what ...

"I will pass over the various specimens of antiquity, a Saracen castle, a Norman basilica, itself built between the limbs of a Temple of Juno. We have arrived. Behold us in a desert at the foot of stony moraines coming down from the mountains. In the distance a glittering sword blade rests on this desert: the sea. Cast your eyes down. Hardly had my brother taken possession of the property this summer, than for want of something better to do he reopened some Punic works six weeks ago, which were abandoned twenty-two centuries before. And what do you think happened? He discovered what are possibly the richest sulphur and rock salt deposits in the whole of Sicily. So far everything has been kept very quiet. My brother has only prospected the ground and taken a few preliminary precautions. Naturally he cannot develop the place himself. He quite realizes that to go into partnership spells failure, as would also leasing it; to say nothing of capital being tied up, even if he could find any. So he wants to sell outright."

Behind the hearse and the smell of the lilac wreaths surrounding the procession with a false sense of springtime, Pastafina drew a resinous looking object from the pocket of his pitch-black Raglan overcoat.

"The sample is amazingly rich; it will catch fire a yard away, and burns with a beautiful blue flame. What a find, caro mio! I have got an eight days' option. I was just off to London when I saw you."

Lewis whistled softly to himself for a minute or two, wondering whether he could find out whether any subsidiary ores were present. Then he said abruptly:

Pastafina plucked out his words one by one as though they were the strings of a guitar.

Lewis took his fountain pen from his pocket and, still walking along, signed a cheque on his silk hat.

"And now," he said, "let's break the ranks as one used to at school, and go and have a vermouth without anyone seeing us."

III

"IT's scarcely credible," said Lewis to himself, as though the words he had uttered a few hours earlier behind the hearse were still ringing in his ears. Neither reflection nor folly had anything to do with his determination. It was just that he had been struck whilst Pastafina was speaking, by the wholly southern character of the approach to La Roquette. Pretty work girls wearing pearls, suits for hire, turtle-doves, songs going up in spirals, corsets. When the road narrowed into a sort of corridor the hearse traced its way with difficulty through a Neapolitan riot of food and life which seemed to overflow on to the passing dead: the dinner dishes, sweet wines, snails, choice tripe. He learnt later that in the adjacent passages lived Bergamask table-leg turners and the Parmesan chauffeurs of the Say refineries, who help to give this quarter its Italian air.

Was it not in this way, by association of ideas, that his most successful speculations had been carried through? He often said, "When in doubt never bring common sense into play."

What he did not say was that the arrangement of letters in a document, the hour at which a telegram arrived, the hidden meaning of colours, the symbolism of numbers constantly intervened in his decisions and influenced him in the moments preceding the signature of a contract. "Things have not changed," he used to say, "since the time when the smell of a chicken's entrails decided the fate of an empire."

Hardly three hours had passed since Lewis in full mourning had, with an indifferent clod of earth, blessed the trench where Monsieur Vandémanque, like a Kanaka chief, with his weapons and his helmet of shells had gone down in answer to the calling of his number, in dress clothes, patent-leather boots and with the insignia of a Commander of the Legion of Honour round his neck, to be guarded henceforth by graphite allegorical figures.

On leaving the cemetery Lewis threaded his way through the huge necropolis like a goods yard in which marble trucks had been side-tracked for ever. Arriving at the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, he leapt into a taxi, drove home, got in through the ground-floor window (the neighbours were quite used to this), threw on the ground his black gloves and his mourning clothes, which lay like an overturned inkstand on the carpet, put on an old golf jersey and a yellow hat which had once been grey, whistled up his dog and fled into the forest of Fontainebleau. He bought for his lunch an enormous lark pasty which would have satisfied the hunger of an entire family, and he ate this with one hand as he steered with the other. At school or in the army, no amount of punishment had ever prevented him from breaking out on the last, and, above all, during the earliest fine days when the spring is still hidden but is there all the same. This mania for playing truant still took possession of him. He would stay for hours seated in the fields on the borders of a forest, breathing in the scent of the soil near the great fallen birch trees, each numbered and arranged in stacks, and which still bore initials carved on their pink flesh like the mirrors in private rooms in restaurants. Lewis only got up in order to follow the already too horizontal sun, or to fire revolver shots at the crows.

Seated amongst the irregular blocks of sandstone which add to that confusion of stones and trees making up the forest of Fontainebleau, in the midst of ferns withered by the frost, dried acorns and rabbit trade, Lewis pictured himself on a white road in Sicily driving his long shadow before him towards a field where amongst the thistles the soil gleamed with a thousand diamond points, "the eyes of salt," as Pastafina had said just before, of salt, brother of sulphur.

The evening grew cooler and Lewis got up with a feeling of strength. He would go to Sicily. He would float a limited company with shares quoted in New York and Buenos Aires to drain away the savings of Italian emigrants.... And, on reflection, why should he not provide the preliminary capital himself without appealing to the Franco-African Bank? In this way he would have a venture entirely of his own. His pride had been clamouring for that for a long time. In short, he would be buying himself an adventure. At that moment he had a sudden feeling that it was going to have a great effect on his life.

His ears, still burdened with the din of traffic, became tired of the absence of sound. He switched on his head lamps and went back to that red glow, that lighter pit picked out with pink which gradually came to life in the night as the cobblestones became rougher: Paris.

LEWIS let himself glide along the Champs Elysées up to where the new streets start. In the newest and most macadamized of all Madame Magnac had her house. He entered the hall, making the black and white flags ring beneath his hobnailed boots, looked at himself in the be-mirrored walls (fine brown eyes, hard and sharp, a strong jaw, shocks of ruffled black hair and a half-open hunting waistcoat), took his dog under his arm and went upstairs.

Elsie Magnac was one of those people who, not content with impressing a seal of garish originality on their surroundings—both friends and furniture—let the superfluity thereof overflow on to the staircases of their houses. On the very first landing a rainbow-coloured vase insisted on acquainting the visitor with the rigid splendour of Aztec art; a gondola lantern ornamented with acorns from a cardinal's hat, adorned the second story.

Everything in Madame Magnac's house was uncompromisingly perfect. Her unpretending name, the mystery with which she surrounded herself, the letters of reproof which she wrote to those papers who, forgetful of her instructions, had printed the names of her guests amongst their society news, all the roaring mechanism of a queen's incognito, enabled her to pass very far from unnoticed.

Following an unhappy marriage, Madame Magnac had sacrificed herself on the altars of friendship, offering herself without reserve on their cold marble. People collected at her house every evening at six o'clock (she made a point of being at home) for a minute criticism of the contemporary situation and an analysis of the contradictions of the human heart. She always received the same friends, with the air of owing her life to each of them, which they all appreciated extremely, particularly the old ones. She only gave up seeing them when they made "foolish marriages," that is to say, married girls whom she considered too young.

There were several lamps on the ground like Davy lamps waiting for their owners, and the uncertain light from these shone up the walls purposely denuded of all decoration.

Her drawing-room had nothing of the obvious and geometric flashiness of a shop, but resembled rather the austere anonymity of the palaces of the great antique dealers through which a noble being with exquisite Levite hands leads one to a shrine hung with grey moiré silk, in which lies, the victim of an overwhelmingly perfect choice, a fourth century effigy of Buddha.

Lewis entered heavily and sat on the floor without any greeting, stretching his big steaming boots to the fire, with his dog, which diffused a loathsome smell, between his knees. With an excess of affectation he liked being untidy in elegant surroundings because it was not displeasing to him to give an impression of strength and bad breeding. Thus it was that he readily dined in a lounge suit in the midst of ladies in evening dress; and he was always asking for out of the way things that disorganized the service at meals.

Not far from him, unconsciously seated above the radiator from which the warm air rose, blowing out the legs of his trousers, was the Prince de Waldeck. The Prince de Waldeck was what Pierre de Coulevain would describe as "Old France"; his face was wrinkled like the sole of a foot, and he wore a Lavallière tie, button boots and a coat of a "Club Agricole" cut; he never shook hands with anyone, and beneath a blustering demeanour concealed a heart of gold. With a certain bitter charm he could talk amusingly about anything because of his warped sense of humour. He was one of the last of the idlers, and belonged to a past generation: in the morning he fenced, in the afternoon he hunted about for seventeenth-century first editions and fortune tellers; he was the only man who still went to tea parties; in the evening he always dressed, even when dining by himself. One of his affectations was never to tell his age. When anyone asked him he answered "—ty-eight," smothering the first part of the number. He was known as Tyate. Not a day passed without his making a pun. He used to act as judge in the jumping at the Horse Show. He occasionally went to theatres but never to music halls or cinemas. In fact he represented a complete period.

At the moment of Lewis's entry the Prince had just told how Madame Briffault, whom he had consulted that afternoon, had foretold that the greater part of his fortune "which he had hidden away in England" (as indeed he had) would soon be lost.

"It's the fault of the financial 'International,' isn't it?" he asked, turning to an ex-Prime Minister for the time being unemployed, who blushed; he took any remark directly addressed to himself as a challenge, and kept himself modestly in a corner like a spittoon.

"You see, Anglophile," he went on, addressing Lewis, "your beastly pound sterling...," to the great annoyance of Captain Montgiscard, himself an obsolete type of naval officer and art connoisseur, who was waiting to be asked to play Delage's Hindu Love Songs on the piano, and who was running his bejewelled fingers through a tactile beard which was like that of a deep-sea fish.

"My dear old Tyate," answered Lewis, "that is of no interest at all. What is amusing is to do business. Whether it is in shells or English bank-notes, or depreciated stock, it is all the same. One is put into this world to gamble."

It pleased Lewis to see his companion's face fall, though he was really very fond of him. He smiled, for he knew the secret mania of the Prince, which was to dabble in speculation. The more absurd it was the more it attracted him; Lewis did the same thing, but whereas he was invariably successful, Waldeck was ruining himself. He was always trying to borrow a million francs till next morning. "Personally," answered Lewis, "I always find it easier to make any money I want by myself without employing sleeping partners." Not that Lewis liked either to tease or to deceive people; but between himself and his friends, in spite of their being schoolfellows (he was educated at les Roches and at Winchester), and of their having shared the same youthful pleasures, there always remained the error of his birth. French on his mother's side, Lewis was the natural son of a Belgian banker who died before he left college, leaving him not only very little money but very expensive tastes without anything to satisfy their requirements but a little Jewish blood; or so it was said. He did not remember his mother. Being brought up by servants, he received lessons in self-reliance, cunning and scepticism, which enabled him to understand his position, to suffer from it and to be revenged for it very early in life. He never forgave his companions of his own age for the gulf that separated them. In 1920, the year when amidst many rude awakenings a curious romantic movement in business triumphed, he was precisely what a century before Balzac called "a Banker's Bastard." Waldeck, Montgiscard, Marbot, and Léonardino, were nevertheless sincerely attached to Lewis. They admired him and considered him to have no equal in most fields. Certain people had, out of jealousy, tried to tread in his footsteps; it cost them dear; it was like sheep following a goat on to the ice and falling through owing to their greater weight. Lewis saw a great deal of his friends, or rather, to be accurate, was much sought by them. Did he like them? He would have felt their loss keenly but he could not resist tyrannising over them. It was not that they had ever shown contempt for him, but Lewis wanted to be revenged on the initial injustice of Fate. He was their superior in vitality, intelligence and sexual power, qualities which fife had compelled him to develop at a time when others, either handsomer or richer than he, let these most precious gifts run to seed. He would have put himself out to any extent or faced any danger to render them a service, but, at the same time he liked to feel them at his mercy. He beat them at games and took away their mistresses—had been doing so for at least twelve years—without feeling that honour was quite satisfied by any of these petty revenges.

"Waldeck and you, Lewis, that's enough!" "You're fined drinks all round," cried Madame Magnac, to show that it was a bachelor party.

At her instigation the subject changed, for it had been settled once for all, on principle, that no discussion on money matters should ever take place in her house. She wanted to maintain her Court of Love in an atmosphere of malice, scepticism and pleasure. ("What is so nice about going to Elsie's," a foolish old man once said, "is that one is in a kind of anthology, of oral chronicle of events.")

"Is it true that since the war people are losing the art of making love?" asked someone.

"You remember what our poor dear Hébrard said about that," answered Madame Magnac.

Many people wondered what could attract her to Lewis and Lewis to her, on seeing her so delicately moulded, so well suited to the society husband from whom she was separated, so exactly like her photographs by Rehbinder, so faithful to the Constitution and to well-constituted people, as Marbot would say, besides being a Chevalière of the Legion of Honour, and all the rest of it. The reason was that in the first place they had been lovers for a long time (which is not really a good reason at the beginning, but subsequently becomes the best possible one); and secondly, that Lewis was good looking. She was not as finely made as he, but she had more refinement. She had great personal magnetism and was passionately fond of pleasure and clothes; she also possessed an excellent cellar, which meant a great deal to Lewis ("He clings to her," said his friends, "like a drunken man to his lamp-post"); in their intimate moments he found her full of inventiveness and fun. They shared an inclination towards greediness, extravagance and pretty women.

"Love," observed the Prince de Waldeck, "is no longer the highly technical trade it used to be."

"Personally," put in Elsie Magnac, "I don't believe that any men are indifferent. It is women who are clumsy."

"Do you mind if I telephone to Martial?" he said abruptly. He made a point of not being a good talker, thinking that not to shine gave him greater authority.

Lewis rang up his office. Martial answered. Lewis announced that he would not be dining with him that evening and that he would leave him to dine alone like an elder with two Susannas. Were they not both flaxen-fair and delightful things to feed?

A lady had telephoned several times from the Hôtel Meurice during the last hour. Lewis remembered that he had an appointment to meet an unknown lady there.

"Go along there before dinner, say you are me and tell her not to bother me," he told Martial.

He had neither the manners nor the polished speech of the middle-class young man, but behaved like a scion of the aristocracy.

Lucky Martial! Little did he dream of this life when Lewis made his acquaintance on the Eastern front on a lovely shell-strewn spring morning in 1915 (another of his geographic adventures). A doctor of philosophy and an ex-cowboy, Martial, at the age of forty-two, had volunteered for active service in the same regiment as Lewis, and at the age of forty-six he had volunteered for service with Lewis himself. He was devoted to him, not because Lewis deserved it at all, but because he had taught him how to live. This fellowship of the trenches carried on into civilian life, such an attachment of a simple soul for a more complex being, had been unheard of since the First Empire. Martial slept at the office, kept the accounts and had not had an hour's holiday in four years. (It was hardly a holiday to have to console all the fair ladies abandoned by Lewis.) He clung to Lewis like a screen photographer to his star. He was quite happy. Lewis paid him a large salary, which he won back from him at poker every month.

"By the way. Martial, I've got some news. Report to me at dawn and I'll tell you all about it."

LEWIS went home. He wanted to be alone. His dinner consisted of a cup of coffee. He went to bed and his head threw a big shadow on the ceiling.

Opening a drawer he took out a red notebook, in which he kept a register of all the women he had loved....

On and on they go, yielding, passionate, credulous, sad, too well fed or half starved. Highly strung and easily bored, Lewis jumped from adventure to adventure with the rapidity of a cinematograph, until he could hardly distinguish between the minor characters and the stars. And yet he would have been shocked at being called fickle. Women: he wanted them all the time, why, he didn't know. He wanted them to study their profiles, to load them with presents, to make them drunk, to cultivate their intelligence, to debauch them, to mould their characters, to get rid of them, to work off his irritation on them, to stay in bed for days instructing them in foreign literature, to avoid eating alone, to wake him up, to get him out of scrapes, to try to get at the truth about them, to travel with them. Particularly to travel with them. It is then that they are most attractive and in their best temper. For do not journeys begin with clothes and end with more clothes? And there is the feeling of infidelity to so many towns, so many people, so many countries. There are as many different pleasures as there are different sheets on the various beds.

Would he go to Sicily alone? It was essentially a journey to be made with a woman. Something rather capricious, a lovely little animal—"Has been in several famous collections," as they say in the auction catalogues. Exquisite hands and feet, and who would talk about herself all the time, would lose the keys of her luggage, write her name in the moisture on the windows and expect one to get out at each station to buy her "souvenirs" of the country.

Lewis very seldom slept, just a few hours, perhaps, towards the dawn. The house was quite quiet. Outside it was raining. Three o'clock struck. Time to start work. He took from beneath his pillow "A Treatise on the Possession of the Subsoil in European Countries: Italy.... Code Napoléon, Recconi law, March 18th, 1873."

He made marginal notes and then, putting on his glasses, drafted a scheme for the development of the deposits of San Lucido.

VII

THE P.L.M. railway bore Lewis rapidly and powerfully away from the life of Paris. After leaving the campanile of the Gare de Lyon behind during dinner, they followed the graceful river outlines of the Seine to Charenton (with its shallops). Then the intoxicating descent through the Burgundian vineyards; after which night lasted as far as Italy.

Lewis only knew Europe from having travelled through it on business, often imperfectly, always hurriedly, without ever opening either his eyes or his heart to it. He knew all about the time tables and itineraries, even though he liked throwing regular routes and through tickets to the winds. He sacrificed depth to length, and, like all his contemporaries, he was—he and his nerves—the victim of the spirit of speed. His business sense was really nothing but a taste for adventure. He worked as he would have played, heedless of rules, selfishly, without giving a thought to the needs of the nation or of the period.

Lewis liked leaving France if he did not like leaving Paris; "this cosmoimpolitan," as Monsieur Vandémanque dubbed him, maintained that he felt far more bewildered beyond the fortifications of Paris than beyond the frontiers of France.

To leave one's country is the next best thing to coming back to it. After passing Modane he had felt the strange atmosphere that one breathes at the gates of France, just as though France were not the most entrancing place to remain in (or perhaps because of it), experiencing that pleasure one has when one's relations with someone or something are strained, but all the more precious for that, and which are so well described by the expression "out of tune." Other countries are only parts of a continent or of the world; France is a sealed vessel, a form of diet complete in itself, interesting to, but not interested by Europe. One can feel German villages tremble at the least sign of movement from a Russian army corps, and the whole of Spain heave at a shot fired at one of her governors in the garrisons of Morocco. London, with even more reason, throbs with a kind of terrestrial neuralgia on hearing of oil being struck in Mexico, or of a political murder in the Punjab. But Paris, self-centred Paris, always remains unmoved. International upheavals reach the Paris press agencies with an air of unreality; from there they find their way into the editorial offices and to the caricaturists, and thence to a laughing public which sings songs about them. The more intelligent people never open a paper. So that on leaving France one has more than at other times the impression of escaping at the right moment and taking a holiday from one's domestic happiness, and of avoiding the danger of living with a wife who is completely satisfying.

Europe itself only begins beyond the frontier. The gates, even on the French side, seem to assume a peculiar character, and in spite of the presence of the customs officials, to have something foreign about them. For an instant the dotted frontier line seems to rise like a drawbridge, and Mentone-Garavan appears in its blue setting with its customs officials smoking at the latticed window of their palm-leaf hut; check trousers are drying on the bougainvilliers, and a commemorative tablet shows that at this point France dates from 1861. A bubbling brook scurries through a gap in the rock pierced by those caves in which primeval man sleeps amongst flints and fossil teeth. At Modane, through which Lewis passed forty-eight hours earlier, the frontier consists of a cold corridor of wet stones suspended over a bronze-coloured torrent with ferns that brush the windows of the passing carriages. Two languages with but a single rail. Frasne-Vallorbe, where begins the land of icy water, black pine trees and cheerless plains, which runs like a sash across the whole of Europe. At Kehl, that bridge which is such a feat of German toil, like an Eiffel Tower flung hurriedly across the Rhine. Jeumont, Feignies, the outlets into Belgium, where during the night the customs' searchlights play amongst the slag heaps lining the pitiless canals like limelight following an actress off the stage. To say nothing of the openings into Spain: Portbou and its Vauban forts, like huge neglected roses, given over to traffic in barrels of sweets medicinal wines; Béhobie with the sound of Spanish klaxons ascending along the Pyrenean torrents. Hendaye and the international bridge where the Guardia Civil hands over extradited people to the French police. Lewis might have left France and won his freedom in almost any direction with his eyes shut.

VIII

THE hotel, if one could dignify by this term the old convent where cockroaches followed one another across the tiled floors like a stencilled pattern, was full of the tragedies of such places in the South; sheets too short (the top one being sewn to the blanket), granite bolsters (from which one wakes with pulverised ears), a permanent odour of disinfectant, candlelit nights on which the tall shadows of the bug-hunters dance across the rough plaster walls, holes in the mosquito curtains through which the mosquitoes crawl, and, pervading everything, the sickly smell of night-light oil.

The town and the port bear different names here; the reason for this is obscure, since the sea is at the end of the street. But if you want to get down to the beach as Lewis did every morning since his arrival in Sicily, you found that it was a forty minutes' walk, first along a road hidden beneath a thick floury dust patterned with chickens' feet, and then through sunken paths, climbing down the same kind of terraces that stretch from Gibraltar to the Atlas, and from Toulon to Lebanon, and make the shores of the Mediterranean look like the tiers of a giant circus. On getting down to the sea you saw that previously in the village you had been on a level with the horizon, and that the hotel itself was nothing but a cube which, set in a block of sky, was so hard that light seemed to break on it, only succeeding in reaching its more salient and unshaded surfaces.

Stretched out naked with the Mattino folded into a cocked hat on his head and his loins girt with a bath towel, Lewis waited for his skin to turn the colour of pyrites. Afterwards there would be a walk under the early afternoon sun to regain the shelter of his room. Thirty yards from the shore the coolness would evaporate, but until then he had to admit it to be the best bathe of the year. The gentle shelving of the shore went on beneath the water; the sand was so hot—even though it was towards the end of autumn—that after eleven o'clock he had to decide on his place and not move from it, at the risk of being scorched. After all, was not Africa just across there, a few hours' journey by sea? Grassless gardens came down towards the beach where olive trees, which were nothing but skin and bone, stretched themselves out of the cracked soil the colour of bread-crust.

That same morning Lewis had received a visit from the brothers Pastafina as he was getting up. The journalist brother had discarded that ferocious pseudo-American elegance of which the Italians were the first pioneers in Europe, especially for film purposes, and had again become the Cavaliere Pastafina, with the peg-top trousers of Italian comedy—the fashion for which begins at the latitude of Naples—celluloid cuffs and an open collar showing a hairy chest. He was followed by his brother, the Commendatore Pastafina, a kind of political Maciste with a bibulous eye, sweeping gestures, black cheeks, nails and armband, oiled hair ending in quiffs, and dressed in that uniform of white cloth buttoned up the side which leads so many Sicilians to be mistaken for half-pay naval officers. The option on the deposits expired that same evening at eight o'clock. Lewis had full power to deal with the matter since he had acted without consulting anyone, being certain of not being called upon to supply all the authorized capital, since the business was bound to prosper from the start. The day before, with the help of experts, he had again confirmed the excellence of the way in which everything combined to make the working satisfactory: operations could be carried out in nearly every case under the open sky, except to the west, in the ancient workings which could be lined with gently sloping galleries; timber and pit props were cheap; there was plenty of labour to be had, except perhaps at harvest time; and a possible output of five hundred tons a day with a profit of sixty lire for each ton extracted. Three borings had been made, all very satisfactory. In the evening Lewis had cut out pieces of blue paper to represent the projected factory, the warehouse and the laboratories, with the enthusiasm of a young couple distributing furniture over a plan of their new home.

Nevertheless he pleaded for a postponement in order to study the matter more closely, particularly from the point of view of the possibility of getting a concession from the municipality of a mixed railway to the seashore, which would carry passengers and thus help to reduce the initial expenses.

The brothers Pastafina, without even looking at each other, spoke together and answered that they were not in a position to grant any delay. A chromolithograph portrait of King Humbert fastened to the wall by a nail, a drawing pin and a wafer, upheld their protestations. Any renewal of option was impossible. The signing was arranged, therefore, for five o'clock that same evening, after the siesta.

Lewis had already been in the water twice. The salt stung his shoulders and his skin began to glisten. Through his closed eyelids the light shone pink, with stabs of darkness and dazzling little radiations, as he listened to the droning song that always seems to accompany sun baths. He thought of the blind men who say: "I can hear the sun." He opened his eyes. The fight seemed to fall vertically as it does in a studio with a top light. Too bright to be the moon, but just as sombre, the chlorine-coloured sun seemed to have been plucked of its rays. The sea, sleek and calm as some oleaginous by-product, had that glaucous tinge of the North Sea at Ostend; for a moment he was bewildered by all this, quite forgetting that he was wearing green spectacles. He took them off and, like a fist between the eyes, he received the full glare of the southern sun in which all shadows are absorbed. The Mattino on his head began to smell scorched. He went into the water again.

After swimming about fifty strokes from the shore, Lewis saw before him, at about the same distance again, a boat propelled by a sailor with a stern oar. In the bows a woman was lying face downwards fishing; bending forward, with a shadow in her bosom, she was letting down her line. She was dressed in a black knitted costume out of which issued arms and legs shaded with lean muscles, spare and very sunburnt. On her head she wore a red india-rubber bathing cap. Lewis admired her. She had that lovely burnt earth colour of Mediterranean skins, whereas he was still only a sallow-skinned barbarian. He swam towards the boat. She must surely be a foreigner to bathe so late in the season; the Italians never think of entering the water after August. Presently he discovered that she was not fishing—she was sounding and taking notes, and seemed to be surveying the bed of the sea.

"I wonder if she is making a chart," Lewis asked himself, turning over on his back and unconstrainedly blowing like a whale. He was still swimming. As he drew near the young woman pushed a stray lock of hair beneath her cap without, however, lifting her eyes to him. Lewis swam a few more strokes, and catching hold of the boat, asked:—

Above, the blueness of the sky was intense. The water reflected a shimmering network of light on to the side of the boat. From the high mountain paths the tinkle of mule bells came to his ears. At the tip of each wave shone a star far brighter than any that shine at night. Dolphins were holding aquatic sports in the distance. Jelly fish, like lost fried eggs, were drifting with the tide. A little cloud hung over the mountain like a Jesuit canopy over an Archbishop's head. Still pulling up the lead, she finally leant over towards Lewis and looked at him; set in a face the colour of iron, were two eyes which in the extreme brightness had faded into grey, and were so frank, so tender, and yet so incapable of any weakness that he could almost feel the water growing colder under her gaze. He made it clear that he was not rested yet by panting for breath.

"Are you tired?" she asked simply, in Italian, in a voice the perfection of which struck him like a fist.

When Lewis lifted his eyes she was gone. He just heard a splash from the other side of the boat and was covered with spray. Turning, he saw her swimming towards the shore. He dashed after her; as he got nearer the sea-bed appeared, along which moved the refracted shadows of their two bodies. She made more headway than he for she swam with a crawl stroke, with bent arms, her head beneath the water, showing her right and left cheeks alternately, her legs stiff and her feet beating the surface of the water. When she touched bottom she had gained twenty lengths on Lewis. He saw her take refuge in a yellow bath gown which an urchin held out to her. She was smiling. Near her was a basket of figs covered with a damp cloth, and an aluminium sandwich box.

Lewis, not having a towel, rolled himself in the sand and, when completely clothed in it, lit a cigarette and lay down on the shore of a deeper brown where the fishermen's nets were spread out to dry.

Quite close by she stretched herself out face downwards, crushing her shadow on to a bath towel, her legs together, her arms above her head as though she was going to dive again. Little blue veins ran along her thighs like tattooed snakes. Her black hair was spread on the sand, leaving her neck bare.

When she had roasted enough she turned over to give the other side a turn. In this position she looked like a romantic English poet drowned and cast up by the storm.

Hornets were flying about just off the ground. Lewis waved towards the sea, beneath violet patches on which sunken rocks were hidden.

ROUND an ebony table (which really turned out to be white marble when the flies were driven off with a duster), behind closed shutters, and accompanied by the chirping of grasshoppers, the lawyer read the deed of transfer before the brothers Pastafina, the Syndic and Lewis who signed it. Six million lire, plus the costs of the sale, plus various commissions, plus the State tax, plus the registration fees, the foreigner's residential tax, the tourist fees, plus the municipal taxes, plus poor rate, odd centimes, so much per cent for war cripples, etc., etc. In evidence of an early development, blue prints of contoured surveys lay on the ground. On the mantelpiece a blow lamp, some samples, a bottle of maraschino.

After the exchange of signatures the journalist took Lewis by the arm and went with him as far as the garage. Lewis wanted a car to go over the land in, but at the garage he was told that a foreign lady had hired the only car the town boasted. Yes, she left immediately after lunch, driving herself (an astonishing thing in the south where even the humblest driver never moves without an "assistant" to start the engine, so as to economise his own strength).

"Then let's go back to your hotel and have a drink," said Pastafina. "I'm going your way."

"Behold the beginning of the season; it is snowing in Paris, dear boy. Foreigners are already beginning to arrive here, asking themselves whether it is better to be bored in the country or ill in town. Once more the barbarian hordes swarm down towards the cities of the sun, of art and of fashionable complaints. Sicily, mind you, really is a land of demi-gods and giants, in spite of old English women and their lace schools."

"Pastifina is right," thought Lewis, as he went down those crowded alleys with their soup-like atmosphere where cabins distempered with the Reckitt blue colour which one finds all over the East, sprang up amongst the eucalyptus trees. And tomato sauce spread out everywhere like a national banner! He stopped at the filthiest blind alleys where heaps of refuse consisting of squeezed-out lemons, dead rats, chicken feathers, old boots, grey hair and fish bones were fermenting together. Pigs slept beneath people's beds. Little herd boys, who were much too good looking, drove goats tied by the leg before them with long bamboos used for cleaning out drains, cursing in their Sicilian dialect full of Spanish words. A gentle breeze before the prison stirred the feathers of the Bersagliere sentries.

Lewis would have liked to fondle the children and the cats; but they all fled from him. He began to reproach himself for lacking sufficient simplicity. Was he never going to arrive at a quiet, easy life? What was to prevent him from settling down here as the proprietor of a villa amongst gigantic oil jars and the shafts of broken columns? To seek what adventure the locality had to offer instead of going away to-morrow as he intended, without having methodically pursued the opportunities which come to every man who takes the time to develop them?

That morning's adventure, for instance. He went over the last few days, a thing he never did as a rule; he asked himself, for the first time in his life, "Have I made a fool of myself, or was I right to sign?" For the first time in his life, too, something in him seemed to call for reflection.

"I am all the more pleased that it is settled," he said, "because if you had not put your name to the papers there were other people after the deal; a new option had been granted by us to begin at eight this evening, the hour at which yours expired. And I can assure you that the deal would have been concluded in a moment."

WHILST waiting for dinner Lewis walked up and down the deserted terrace. A tinge of blue lay over everything. He looked at the sea a thousand feet below him, casting little short waves on to the beach so lazily that each one seemed as if it were going to be the last, after which one expected it to become once for all a large silent lake. A lizard made the dry leaves rustle; the walls, warmed all day by the sun, were growing cold as the evening drew on and creaked like a cooling stove. Along the thread-like paths rising to where he stood, Lewis saw old women returning from the spring carrying their water jars on their heads. The coastline quivered like a rustic script and, underlined by lights, strove to maintain a straight line cut only here and there by harbours.

Lewis escaped from none of those monotonous but charming problems which arise between two people placed in direct contact by fate. He was first conscious of that local anæsthesia which extends itself to every thought but the one that is absorbing us, on discovering that he could not get up any interest in the purchase of the mine. Whatever subject he touched on, he lost himself in reverie. He was thinking of this stranger woman. She had doubtless hired the car for lack of something to do. What was she doing all alone in this country? Where did she spend her evenings? He had already forgotten her features. Her image seemed to fall with the night: he rather doubted whether it would rise again with the sun next morning. He had lost it for ever. He tried very hard to recall it. Suddenly he remembered one perfect and illuminating detail which had never struck him at the time: her hand with its nails quite violet from their long immersion in cold water. A short hand in which common sense triumphed over dreaminess; the thumb was large, in itself rather a rare thing amongst women, and full of common sense; but she had tapering fingers which were always close together. There was a general effect of loyalty, fidelity, quickness and clearness of intelligence which, on reflection, won him completely. A useful hand. A seventeenth-century hand. He had held so many others, sensuously modelled, too exquisite to be followed in all their lines, dimpled, full of whims, hands which grow damp under the influence of music or pleasure.

To see her again. To touch that hand at last.... To distract himself he began to compose a song in the German manner:

He suddenly realized with a pang of regret that this evening no one was waiting for him anywhere. He thought of Madame Magnac in Paris. The pleasant life he led seemed to him from this distance to be full of privations. He pictured his existence as having been terribly hard hitherto; a womanless childhood and an orphaned youth; he began to pity himself. He hoped that happier days were in store for him. He decided to make more friends; he managed his life extremely well and had always kept away from big dinner parties, definite office hours, servant troubles, professional conversationalists, marriage, scenes with mistresses and all other things that might prey upon his liberty, the luxury tax of snobbishness, the money troubles of his friends, children, the disdain of the haughty, the envy of his inferiors, in fact everything that spoils our daily life. But all this was negative and unsatisfying.

Night began to fall, accompanied by music coming from no one knew where; a shutter banged against a wall, rattling like a skeleton; the ancient clocks beat out one by one the dangerous weapons of the iron hours.

Above the village street the mountain still thrust up its dusky hump, bearing, without flinching, the weight of the older quarters of the town, placed so high that the topmost windows touched the lowest stars.

A WAITER came through the blue-distempered glass doors of the restaurant and familiarly handed Lewis a visiting card between his fingers (the summer service of the hotel).

Someone was asking to see him. He was just about to say that he was not in when he changed his mind.

Lewis greeted her, congratulating himself on the unexpectedness of the thing. Then he said suddenly in a formal voice:

She replied, composedly, that her name was Apostolatos, Irene Apostolatos, that the Apostolatoses of Trieste were her first cousins and that they managed the bank between the three of them. The London Apostolatoses were her uncles; the New York Apostolatoses (who had married, one, a Lazarides of Marseilles, and the other a Damaschino of Alexandria) were her great uncles. In fact, they all belonged to the same family and came originally from the Greek Islands.

"What is the Apostolatos Bank doing here?" asked Lewis, as though he were unaware of the patient efforts of the Greek banking group to lay hands on the mineral products of the Mediterranean. He well knew the reputation for greed and stability held by this old house, which dated from the Greek Independence.

"Didn't Pastafina tell you that we held an option on the San Lucido deposits after the expiry of yours? I was alone at Trieste when they put it up to us, eight days ago. It interested me deeply; one of my cousins was at Vichy, the other in Constantinople; I took a fast Lloyd boat going to Malta and came on here."

"I go back to-morrow; so there's no time to be lost. I came to see you, monsieur, to propose to buy you out. What do you want for the deposits?"

Lewis could not see her properly as she stood there in the light of a garden lamp round which the butterflies were hovering and casting flickering shadows on her face. Her dress was of that stiff yellow muslin which is put round chandeliers to keep away the flies. Lewis smiled as he thought of the lovely soft dresses which Welsm was producing that year in Paris. Nevertheless, as she stood there before him, her legs slightly apart, her stomach forward, her figure erect, she looked like a figure of "Victory."

Suddenly they found themselves in the gloom, just a man and a woman on whose races the uncertain light traced latticed patterns. The scenery had changed just as much as they had. The mountain spurs projected violently out of the darkness, leaving the ravines which separated them still plunged in it. In the square in front of the church, and lower down in the Giardini, the town bands (it being Thursday) were playing two different airs from the same Verdi opera. A diadem of acetylene flares at the prows of the fishing boats quivered on the sea. Now and then one of the beams was broken by a flash of darkness; a fisherman's arm brandishing a harpoon.

They seemed to be suspended between the dark masses of the sky and of the earth, in a double lighting, one a geometrical light along the pavements, and the other an irregular poetic light in the sky.

"The Franco-African Bank cannot develop deposits like those of San Lucido, which require the very latest machinery plant and highly technical advisors. You will be compelled either to sell out or to float a new company. Perhaps you have already decided to do this? I know that if you don't it won't be for want of capital, but still.... Would you like to share? To come to an agreement or, as we say in Greek, a 'symphony.' Would you let us subscribe thirty per cent, of the capital, but with shares carrying plural votes? You will always be wanting lire here, and Trieste is a place whose co-operation is not to be despised."

"Especially as the Italian exchange brokerage is particularly in your favour, being supported by the purchaser to the extent of one-quarter per cent.

"We are not Italians, monsieur," she replied with dignity, "but Greeks, and our brokerage is the English brokerage."

Lewis looked at her standing there in a kind of phosphorescence. He thought, until he saw her smile, that nothing could be brighter than her face; a big Grecian face with strong lines, like the too modern cameos in the shops of the Vomero. A straight, honest mouth, a mouth made for truth. Eyes whose gaze one could not imagine having to be lowered, and which were steadier and saw further than the eyes of women. Black hair plastered down like that of her Tanagra sisters. And for all that a certain eighteen thirty romanticism about her forehead....

"At any rate," she went on insistently, "would you be willing to dispose of a part of your concessions to us? We would be able to bring you co-operation of the very finest kind in exchange."

She spoke with a precision which contradicted all that is said about the music of words and all that is known of language; an incomparably pure French, that is to say, a perfect use of idiom, courteous, clearly articulated and rich in metallic nasal sounds, without the least foreign accent, without any of those slipshod constructions, fashionable clippings and slovenliness of everyday speech. Powerful without being violent, and full of dignity.

Whilst she was talking Lewis kept asking himself whether he would ever be able to put to her those questions which he was accustomed to put to women with that familiar and chaffing air of authority which he found so successful. But he felt that she would either not reply or would tell him the honest truth (is there any other kind?), and he dared not risk it.

For the first time he had the impression of having before him a person who was completely confident, and that any opinion she might issue was fully guaranteed.

Nevertheless, in the darkness her voice became warmer, softened a little, and betrayed a certain wilfulness.

Lewis then realized that he had not heard a word she had said, and had only been listening to the sound of her voice; he had to give her some reply.

"I am very sorry, madame," he said, "but everything you suggest is impossible. We have decided to develop the property ourselves."

PART TWO

LEWIS never woke in the morning with the heavy eyelids of Burgundy drinkers whose kidneys have been working all night, or the bloodshot eyes of the student, or the purple wedding rings round the eyes of lovers, or the dank locks of dancers on the morning after a ball, or the gambler's skin in which one can see a reflection of the green cloth. From the bedclothes issued the strong irregular features of a man of thirty which, lifted in the middle by the narrow ridge of the nose, seemed to fall gently away along the slope of the cheeks. His day-old beard accentuated the heaviness of his jaw.

Lewis had no office furniture or desk. Neither card indexes nor Turkey carpets nor crocodile skin armchairs. He never worked anywhere except in his bedroom, like a poetess. The same pieces of furniture which saw him when he was ill, or daydreaming amongst books scattered on the floor, or staying in for days, or entertaining queer companions, also witnessed his labours as a business man. In his Buhl bureau there was one drawer for files, one for handkerchiefs, one for memoranda, one for hairbrushes, one for engineers' reports, and one for marginal deals (all his cheques smelt of brilliantine).

When Martial came along in the morning, he was more like a provincial on his way through Paris coming to see a friend to pass the time, than a secretary with the mail. If Lewis was going out all night Martial found a note pinned to the pillow with instructions for buying and selling when the market opened, the people whom he wanted to see if they called, etc.

But the house soon filled up, for Lewis was always known to be in during the morning. Clients, Stock Exchange runners, commission agents and brokers began to arrive. The telephone rang continuously in a sharp querulous way, punctuated by the alphabetic hail of typewriters. A private exchange was installed at the head of his bed, keeping him in touch with his offices, his engineers, his desk at the Bourse. (When he woke late he could listen to the tidal sound of buying and selling from the depths of his bed clothes.) All this agitation, this modern comfort, this life of violence, of expenditure of nervous energy and of speculation was in curious contrast with the portly seventeenth-century mansion in a leafy road on the Rive Gauche. Through the windows a Le Nôtre garden unfolded itself, restored in every detail (even to a reinforced concrete pergola) by the actual owners, who were Mexicans. The trees and artificial lakes were blue with frost, for it was mid-winter. There was nothing to remind one of Sicily but some labelled samples of sulphur in a bowl, and occasional patches of ultramarine in the sky.

Lewis was dictating from his bed, laying down the facts of some disputed question.

"I am only an amateur, really," he used to say. "I don't work to 'woo the fickle goddess Fortune' or to be a 'money baron' or any of the other Yellow Press expressions. I work to amuse myself. Negotiating loans amuses me more than yachting, and floating companies more than playing poker. That's all it is."

Lewis did not lay the results of his journey to Sicily before the directors of the Franco-African. Obstinately, in accordance with his first idea, he got together the necessary capital and floated a limited company on his own account; the share certificates were being printed. As soon as they were fully issued he would have them quoted on the Paris Bourse; in a year they would be quoted at Trieste and in New York. A whole army of technical men, chemists, mechanics, etc., was on its way out. Lewis counted on work being seriously begun at San Lucido by the end of the month.

The effect of this satisfactory state of affairs on him was to develop in him a moroseness almost amounting to neurasthenia. Like many men of his generation, Lewis was at once practical and imbalanced, matter-of-fact and neurotic. He complained that success clung to him like a "bad patch" to a gambler. He always made a profit even from the riskiest ventures; it was about this time that the Steel and Smelting Company managed to keep four huge furnaces of two hundred and fifty tons capacity each alight at Gebel Hadid, in spite of the industrial crisis, and everyone knows in what an enormous profit that resulted. What irritated him most was the impression of success he gave everyone, when all his successes were far smaller than he expected. He had left the card room at the club the day before because he was bored with winning. "Financiers," he said, "are only clear-sighted in financial matters. It is a gift, a kink; in everything else they're idiots. The entire French nation goes in for nothing but finance. It's the last straw."

He had imagined himself so often to be in love, always either stopping himself or being stopped in due course, that he did not like to answer the question. He would have been afraid of driving himself into it. Lewis imagined that he lived in perfect harmony with himself in a kind of solitary egoism from which he never emerged save to satisfy his instincts, and he meant to go on living like that. It must not be forgotten that Lewis had no great strength of character. Very far from it. He always said that in love it is never dangerous to hit above the belt. He did not believe in too much self-examination. Neither pride nor personal integrity mattered to turn, as he always acted on impulse. His reflexes stood him in the stead of morals and education.

This indifference did not now prevent him from feeling his heart sink occasionally beneath the load of some obscure weight, some feeling of uneasiness. Where did this chronic condition originate? In Sicily?

His self-esteem had not been called into play at all. At no moment had he, as the Orientals say, "lost face." Quite the contrary. And yet, ever since those few words which he spoke to put an end to the conversation of that one evening, he had felt himself dominated, kept in check by an invisible will, by the emanations of a personality whose influence neither distance nor time could weaken. On the occasion of Pascal's centenary, Lewis had read in his diary some of the thoughts of that too little-known author. He remembered one: "The first effect of love is to inspire a profound respect." It had made him laugh, and then it had made him think. As a rule he only thought of Irene as of a business rival. Sometimes as a human being as well. But that any woman was not made to sacrifice herself (to him, of course) amazed him; that a woman could have any duties unconnected with love shocked him.

Lewis sought for help against these strange and new sentiments which beset him amongst other people. Most of them failed him, as usual. But he had at least the consolation of taking hostages and sacrificing victims.

Lewis upbraided her for surrounding herself with armorial bindings and greyhounds; for giving people wines so old that they had gone bad; food so cooked that there was nothing left of it. For being a slave to appearances, for having one of those Christian names that age with the years, which is serious, but which do not age with their bearers, which is awful. For being afraid of divorce for provincial reasons, disguised behind the bigotry of the Faubourg Saint Germain. He began to hate her drawing-room, which looked like a room on the Classic stage. He prated of purity: Madame Magnac retorted, not inappropriately, that women are what men make them. He was irritated with her misquoting Taoist philosophers, with her beginning to wear a tired look (she looked like a shop-soiled book fading in the window); with her wealth of which she made no worthy use; with her pre-war figure; with her salon which was nothing but a society clinic; with her snobbishness, which classed and unclassed her; with her proud bearing, which disguised a thousand weaknesses; with her artistic taste, which was really nothing but a form of vigilance—which to a certain extent everyone possesses; with her jadishness, the distribution of her favours (all the more because she did not even trouble to keep her infidelities from him); with her telegrams to crowned heads, with the inevitable replies from their secretaries; with her lies and her habit of calling the Duc de Vendôme by his Christian name when he wasn't there; with her lack of candour and charm; with her pretensions to exoticism, continually taking things up and dropping them again; with her Marcel waves; with her tiaras of kingfisher feathers, which gave her the grotesque and ridiculous appearance of an Arlesian effigy; with her bath sunk into the floor; with her mania for being in the midst of everything whilst pretending to live the life of a recluse; with her way of answering when anyone asked if she intended to be present at a party to which she had not been invited: "I really cannot, I have had to go on strike."

III

LEWIS lived alone. He took his meals in his room, went to bed at nine o'clock and pulled the bedclothes over his head the better to isolate himself; he pursued his thoughts without much result, but at any rate with honesty. He began to find limitations in himself. Was he good, or only pitiless?

He was aware of having changed, of no longer being what he had been a year before at that time. So that, without quite having lost confidence in himself, he was no longer sure that he could do anything he liked and that anything could either be bought or seized. He began to ask himself of what use he was in this world. Every time he met a good woman who avoided his gaze his heart seemed to falter.

No longer furnishing his house according to his needs, he began to decorate it according to a definite scheme. Artistic objects had cluttered up his room like old iron in the liberated regions of France. He turned them all out. He began to study the best periods of art. Aided by his instincts, he soon passed through the lower stages, coming back to first principles by abstract methods, like all Modernists. He grasped the fact that an age like our own is great enough to disregard tradition.

He no longer visited the shops to which Madame Magnac used so often to take him after lunch. He avoided those old curiosity shops which had grown up since the war, like cheap eating houses round a racecourse. From the insipidity of the by-products of the eighteenth century, which hung their sky-blue bows in the Rue la Boétie, alarmed by the propinquity of negro masks, and jostled by the rigid interpretations of Cubist masters, to the farmhouse furniture of the Boulevard Raspail which was handed over to specially bred worms to eat, passing by the German antiquaries of the Place Vendôme where our rickety fifteenth-century Madonnas dwell in shivering captivity. Those dismal rooms furnished with "association pieces," those beds made for guilty passion in dimly-lit Louis XVI rooms, and which one sees lit up by motor head-lamps in the Faubourg Saint Honoré in the evenings, the delicate china which quivers at the change in the value of the pound sterling and the passing of omnibuses, all these things disgusted Lewis; he was disgusted by the little plump hands of the art experts, organizing the emigration of all this poor French furniture created for solitude, grace and modesty, and which would turn up again in the antipodes, probably upside down.

THE days followed each other as monotonously as long-distance runners with their numbers on their backs like the leaves of a calendar.

Lewis no longer went anywhere and refused all invitations. He catalogued his books. He gnawed the ends of his pencils and bit through his pipes. He got pleasure out of wasting time. "I am out of work," he said, "and I am learning to be lazy."

When Martial expressed surprise, asking him: "Are you preparing for your examination of conscience?"

"Poor old chap," decided Martial, "I don't know who it is, but you've certainly got it badly this time."

"BY the way," said Lewis, without guarding against the association of ideas, "what do you think of that?" And he held out to Martial a telegram that had come from Pastafina that morning.

"Do you know that this business, which at first seemed so perfectly easy to run, is beginning to worry me seriously?"

"It's always the same story. I don't like these affectuosissimo and dilatory replies followed by complete silence."

And yet six weeks before a party of carefully chosen engineers had been despatched to San Lucido. Their prospecting continued to have excellent results, but so far not a stroke of actual work had been done. Formality after formality with an anti-French municipality ended in nothing but further checks, and permission to construct the railway line past the foot of Battaglia had been refused, in spite of an appeal to the Courts; they had had to face the prospect of getting their produce to the shore by a service of lorries which was rendered precarious by the absence of fuel supplies and an execrable road.

When the question arose of the establishment of an outlet to the sea and the utilization of the creek nearest to the works (the very one where Lewis used to bathe) it was far worse: the Company certainly possessed the authority and the possibility of building piers fairly quickly for loading ships; but they found that though, as shown on the maps, there was quite enough water, there was a chain of reefs just outside which made it dangerous for cargo boats to approach in rough weather. And so they had to consider loading from tenders on the high seas. After several attempts this had to be given up and they turned to the west, to Marmarole; there the land at the back of the south jetty was admirably adapted for the disposition of sheds and warehouses. But when they decided to make use of it, they were told that all the land had been let a short time before (the deal had been carried through in haste anonymously, and nothing had been done with the land since). Labour problems became more and more complicated: where before labour had been scarce, it had now disappeared altogether; where labour could be found the Trades Unions demanded such high wages that it was useless to start work. The emigration offices, the local Press, the local authorities, the Labour Bureau, the election agents, even the delegates of the Mafia seemed for once to be at one, banded together against this French undertaking. In whose pay were all these people? Lewis instituted enquiries. Some interesting facts came to light. Soon the hand of the Compagnia Pascali of Palermo appeared; behind them, issuing orders to them, a combine of Malto-Italian banks whose instructions were discovered to come from No. 8 Via Petrarcha, Trieste; in other words, from the Apostolatos Bank.

VII

SOME time after this Lewis went to supper with a famous Champagne merchant who, in spite of his age and a rather assailable position, still financed a good number of charming little ladies.

After crossing one of those streets in the Champ de Mars which seem to be cut in butter, Lewis entered a little house at an hour when there were no longer any servants about: anyone who liked could go in by the open door. Unlike the Magnac Salon, it was an unfashionable house, in other words an amusing one, full of pretty women and good vintage wine (that pink 1911, like disguised raspberry syrup), and where no expense was spared for the entertainment of the guests; even to the extent of having gifts beneath every napkin. The host was celebrating that evening the thirtieth anniversary of a secret malady which had not interfered with his tempestuous mode of life. To this party, of which Paris had been talking for weeks, he had invited all the specialists who had treated him during these thirty years, and even the lady to whom he owed what was, after all, so little worry, and whom he discovered at Laval where she ran a church furnishing shop. She sat opposite him at the head of his table, wearing a bonnet and a dress of Alençon lace.

Lewis was at the daffodil table (each table being named after a colour), next to Hector Lazarides who was sucking at his Homard à l'Americaine and wearing a helmet with a nose-piece which made him look like the Greeks of Pericles in Duruy's manual. Lazarides was an old Greek parasite who, after twenty centuries, still remained the Gnatho of ancient comedy, and who lived in an attic facing the Tuileries in a hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. A gay old sentimental corsair, he hawked things about, looked after his friends' wives and took them out, stayed in bed when he had no victims, "fallen between two mugs," he used to say, or, "in the dead season," and if by some oversight he was asked down to the country he never left. (To such a point that the Prince de Waldeck had to have the wing in which he had put him up for one night pulled down after two years in order to get rid of him.) He was always asking people to find him something to do. When anyone offered him a job he would refuse with dignity, saying: "I can make more than that by borrowing." An impecunious old snob, he had only abandoned the scepticism of a lifetime at the sight of his fallen monarch, whom he set about serving with a guilty fervour. But even this did him no good, because far from his Francophobia strengthening his social position in Paris, as it generally does. Fate willed that people should frown on it; so that he was thenceforth, like this evening, forced to spend the night amongst the higher strata of commerce.

He could not be too civil to Lewis, taking off his helmet, bowing his head on which three hairs still curled like electric bell wires. Lewis brought the conversation round to Greece and to Irene.

"But I knew her quite well as a child!" cried Lazarides, "at Aix, at Nauheim, at Zalzomazziore (he exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness the lisp that Trieste Greeks have borrowed from the Venetians). She used to look after her father, a choleric old gentleman who was always blackguarding his servants and distributing five franc pieces amongst the little ladies who called him 'papa.' I saw her again as a young girl in Rome. There she married Pericles Apostolatos who, following the Greek custom, was old enough to be her father; he was at school with me at Condorcet. He killed himself two years ago after some unsuccessful speculations. As he was only a trustee, his personal fortune passed to the creditors; but as Irene is a modern young woman she went into business with the help of her cousins, paid her husband's debts and built up his fortune again; now, as you probably know, she is practically the head of the Apostolatos Bank. Such a thing is unheard of in the history of Greece. She is a thoroughly excellent girl and she hasn't had much of a time. Brought up in our old school. You Parisians have no idea of what that means, what an awful thing youth can be, shut up in those huge Oriental houses whose doors never open save to admit the cephalonite priest who comes to teach the Pistevo, our creed, and then a premature marriage, often by proxy."

"And yet," said Lewis, "I have met young Greek girls at Marseilles, playing tennis on the courts in the Avenue de la Cadenelle...."

"The Marseilles Greeks are middle-class people who try to make themselves pleasant to the French and to marry into the local families. There is no connection between these and ancient Hellenic strongholds like Trieste. There the aristocracy is closely hedged round, impenetrable, and no misalliances are possible. They will have none of the little dowry-hunting Italian Counts, and they marry big black satyrs who talk through their noses and, grunting like pigs, make huge wedding presents, of Viennese taste, to their brides. It's nothing to laugh at. Think of these charming little girls going off with their languorous eyes to conquer the gambros, the betrothed, followed by their families—those Greek families which move all together like migratory sardines in the Mediterranean: abruptly to be shown the secret of life, and then to be worn out with motherhood and submerged for ever."

Having spoken, Lazarides blew into a little limp skin which he had in the palm of his hand, and this became a green duck which took flight over the table with a penetrating scream and was killed by someone with a fork.

The conversation was interrupted by a stag hunt through the house in which the manager of a big bank in the Place Vendôme took the rôle of the stag with the pegs from the hat rack. It ended in a porphyry bath where the hard-pressed animal and taken refuge, the tails of his coat floating amongst the strawberries which the hot water had made it impossible for him to retain.

When the party broke up at dawn, their feet sunk in the rainy pavement beneath the Eiffel Tower slumbering above the clouds, Lazarides went home charged with an important mission which he alone could bear to Trieste, by those mysterious primitive telepathies of the Greeks, which are the wonder of the western world: Lewis, after some very bitter moments, had resigned himself to begging to inform that he was ready to negotiate and to give up part or, if necessary, the whole of the mines of San Lucido.

VIII

TO right and left of Lewis the motors purred evenly, changing their song occasionally with the wind. He was in front, in a sort of veranda commanding the English Channel; between his knees he held a paper bag in which to give up his soul if the passage were rough. But the weather was fine and the aeroplane floated on the elastic air, now and then leaping lightly over invisible dips and charging seemingly impenetrable clouds. Lewis read, without understanding them, Freud's three essays on sexuality, which cause the barrier of innocence to recede to such an alarming extent. Occasionally he raised his eyes and saw before him through the incurved windows, the sea pink-tinted by the setting sun, rippling away into space like a tapioca pudding. Held up by little half-inches of sail, the fishing fleet was entering Boulogne, six thousand feet below. Preening themselves with their little wisps of smoke, tugboats were preparing to drop their anchors for the night beyond the jetty. Lewis laughed as he saw beneath him the ports, roads, stations, all this human material of another age. Behind him some Americans were discussing the rates of exchange with the roar of gold machinery in their mouths, and at the very end of the fuselage lay boxes of frocks, a ton of morning papers and cherries at five francs each for Piccadilly.

The sand dunes of France disappeared and with them those brackish swamps where the salt leaves tracks like those of snails. Soon Lewis found himself over the well-nourished English downs. (No, England is not scraggy, she is only a little low chested.) A model for an ideal country. France from a bird's eye view is like a patchwork quilt; it is all used up in samples: mosaic fields cut up into strips whittled away at each end by the succession laws. Roads so straight that they might have been cut with a knife, breaking away at the villages round which they make rectilinear patterns, like the petals of meagre flowers. The English country road is less rational and less sensible, but much more shady and companionable.

Dusk was falling. A blue mist was rising, covering everything but the billowy tree tops and the pointed roofs of the coast houses. Then came the London suburbs out of which the crowds seemed to rise like bubbles to the surface of a pond full of organic matter, and the first trams with their headlights and BOVRIL in letters of flame. It was only light now in the sky. Why do we say that night falls? Surely it rises. At last the motors died down, the propellors appeared suddenly, the travellers' ears began to sing, and each blade of grass became gigantic as it swayed in the rush of air: Croydon aerodrome.

How far from Le Bourget, left only two hours before, far from the Abattoirs and the Flanders road bordered, as if by geraniums, by slaughtered pigs and petrol pumps, towards the stony desert of the aerodrome where the huge aeroplanes sweating green oil sleep in their reinforced concrete stables. Where was the stream of pretty painted work girls, so lissom and exotic, leaving their work in Paris like Seville cigarette makers? Here one fell right into the arms of the Anglican Church. Sunday: Evensong: the 5th chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The country offered to the traveller not the dismal countenance of a railway station, but a green countryside, with new-washed cheeks. Let us make a chimney descent into the heart of the English home. In the clubs the diners were allowed, for that evening only, to dine in day clothes. On the Sabbath, that weekly day of catalepsy, the basements of the houses were all shut up and the servants who lived there were at church; the Salvationists sang in a South Eastern Railway tunnel in which the smoke obstinately lingered; the Israelites, who are opposed to the silk hat habit, were returning home from the symphony concerts; the playing fields were empty, under a curse; not a wisp of smoke came from the chimney pots, for everyone was having cold supper. The only places open were the fire stations and the public houses reeking of leather and malt.

Lewis was driven to London to a hotel in the Strand. His room looked out over the Thames, which at this point traces a soft silvery curve towards the Houses of Parliament. He opened his bag and took out the files in it. He stared for a moment at the one on which was written "San Lucido" in blue pencil. He shrugged his shoulders wretchedly.

THE next morning at about midday Lewis walked up Fleet Street towards Old Jewry where the Apostolatos Bank had its London branch.

Fleet Street bows down and sags beneath the weight of the railway bridge and of bundles of newspapers and then, as though shot up by a spring board, leaps up Ludgate Hill towards St. Paul's Cathedral, scales it and rises to the copper pink sky. On the hoardings are views of Wales with blue skies as deceptive as the Celts themselves; on another poster a gentleman in a quilted dressing gown is smoking by his fireside surrounded by children playing amongst his legs like lion cubs, pictures which appear to excite the natural laziness of the natives.

Lewis skirted St. Paul's to where the unfrosted windows of the wholesale merchants begin, and came at last to the old Jewry and the Apostolatos Bank, an Adam house, ivory white outside and painted inside in sea green and dark brown in Dickensian shades, with the legend on the door in black letters:—

APOSTOLATOS BANK
FOREIGN BANKERS, FOUNDED IN 1846.
FREIGHTAGE, ADVANCES ON MERCHANDISE.
BRANCHES AT ATHENS, SALONICA,
ARGOS, KALAMATA, CORFU, NAUPLIA,
LARISSA, VOLO, CANEA, MYTILENE.
Special shipments to the Piraus.

These Greek names, torn from coasts so tormented that Reclus compares them to the convolutions of the human brain, exiled to the north like the metopes of the Parthenon, sparkled here with such Oriental fire that Lewis blinked. They recalled to him warmth, sweet lemons and the Mediterranean so full of salt that it makes marks like fruit stains on one's clothes.

The ground floor contained wooden counters and ledgers like antiphonals as tall as the book-keeper himself, bound in whole ox skins and studded with brass nails. This entrance was like the window of Lock's hat shop, and bore witness to the venerable age of a firm which, though foreign, claimed respect as a right by virtue of its good old English methods and neatly a century of commercial probity.

In the upper stories everything had been altered; polished brass plates replaced the black painted letters, and the old folios had been dethroned by American filing devices. Worked by a one-armed sergeant plastered with medals, modern lifts sucked the customers upwards to the roof. On the third floor Lewis passed through the general office, where an army of youths with heads shining like patent leather boots worked behind polished bars, and was introduced into the private offices of the Bank: a thick pile carpet, frosted windows and enamelled spittoons with the encouraging inscription: "Make sure of your aim"; in the anteroom those outward signs of English commercial standing: silk hats and umbrellas.

The drum of the revolving door beat the salute and the three directors of the Apostolatos Bank, supported by their general manager, Mr. Rota, rose to their feet. They were waiting for Lewis in the middle of the huge office lined with strong boxes let into the wall, with portraits of the Chairman of the Bank in 1846, 1852, 1867 and 1876 (all of them, even though Greeks to the core, become either from vanity or necessity English knights, Turkish pashas, Austrian barons, etc.; in each case there was a change in the cut of the frock coat and the shape of the top hat).

They examined one another. Lewis saw that beneath their ultra British exteriors, their lounge coats, buttonholes and fancy trousers of City men, he was dealing with Orientals, jealous, passionate, untutored, sons of men who had specialized in exactly the same kind of business for a century, negotiating it with tradition, patience and greed; in fact the exact opposite to himself. Their skin, in contrast to that of their English subordinate staff, was yellow.

Some Samos wine was brought and they got to work. They worked quickly, these Greeks having sacrificed to Anglo-Saxon methods their natural taste for verbiage and quibbling.

The Apostolatos Bank were prepared to take over the San Lucido property for the sum of £150,000 sterling. In addition, they would refund the money spent on works concessions, on commissions and adjudications, and the sums advanced for harbour dues. The Greeks were also to take over the material already brought to the spot and would compensate the French Bank for the two waterfalls already harnessed and for the turbines installed, even taking over the dynamos then on their way between Marseilles and Porto Empedocle. In consideration of this, 167,000 shares (out of the 200,000 which Lewis controlled) would pass into their black Palikar paws.

The oldest, Pisistrates, his skull as bare as a Greek landscape, pulled out his watch:—

"My cousin Irene has telephoned to say she will be a few minutes late. She only landed from Trieste this morning. It is essential that she should be here for the exchange of signatures."

"I am going further. I am staying with my uncle Solon in Bayswater," said Irene.

They went out together and crossed the road through the lunch-time traffic, through the crush of lorries and buses wedged together like pack ice and loaded to bursting point, in the canyon-like streets, between the streams of people emitted from the offices to be swallowed up underground or to lunch standing up in bars and in A.B.C. tea shops.

They got out at Knightsbridge Barracks. The last of the morning riders were coming in, and already the afternoon hacks, loose-jointed, with lack-lustre coats and harness, smelling of the livery stable, were taking possession of the Row. They went obliquely across the grass dotted with big trees, whose branches were as regular as those of genealogical trees; English girls wearing imitation amber necklaces were going home, with novels bound in green cloth under moist armpits, accompanied by long limp youths who walked with bent knees, carrying their hats in their hands.

"Just now in that office you frightened me even more than you did in Sicily," said Lewis.

"Not so much now. When you are doing nothing you are much more like other women. I've often thought of you.... Are you romantic?"

"No, romance was invented by people who have no hearts. Personally, my thoughts have been of San Lucido."

"And now you have got your reward. You are a good business woman; you know how to persevere."

"Shall I tell you why I let you beat me? I did it to see you again," said Lewis, softly.

"Don't be silly. You gave in because you couldn't do anything else. You were heading for financial quicksands when the time came to pay. You've got a cool head so you cut off a finger to save your hand, as they say at the Bourse."

"Financial quicksands for the Franco-African?" asked Lewis. "For a little matter of six million lire?"

"It's nothing to do with the Franco-African," retorted Irene, calmly. "It's you. You've been acting all through this business entirely on your own account without consulting your Board. Do you think I don't know that? You acted from pride, as I should possibly have done myself. In proportion as your difficulties increased—and I don't deny that I helped—your personal resources, or those of your friends, diminished. A time comes when the fight of one against many becomes impossible, don't you see? I knew you could appeal to your backers. But I also guessed that you would rather give up the mine than lay the situation before them when it was going badly. Wasn't I right?"

Lewis kept his eyes fixed on the ground. "Yes," he replied, furiously, "of course you are right."

"It's no good trying to do anything with you," he went on. "Why aren't you a woman?"

The blood rushed to Irene's face and flooded it with a soft pink. Her eyes grew misty and her mouth trembled.

"Is there pain in your heart or only in your eyes?... Please forgive me. I only meant: why do you always think before you speak, why do you never smile, why don't your pupils dilate with interest when you are being discussed? Why do you think of what other people are doing?"

"It isn't that. Don't make fun of me. What did you mean when you asked me why I was not a woman? Is it because I am well-balanced? It is a perfectly natural balance."

"I am naturally well-balanced, too," replied Lewis. "I can walk about in the dark with a glass of water without spilling a drop."

"Surely when one has being doing serious business one can laugh afterwards? Would you rather I sulked over my defeat?"

"Personally, I hate sensible people. I am suspicious of fanatics and I believe in mercy."

"I admire perfection.... We could go on like this all day. It is just two o'clock, and when people are late for meals uncle Solon gets sullen."

"Before leaving you," said Lewis, "one last question: there is nothing subtle between us, is there?"

She left him without having lost any of her assurance or self-possession. He had an impression of a brown clean-cut face, narrow hips, stockings drawn tight over transparent ankles, a jumper which her bosom hardly stretched, and a scarf knotted round her neck and floating in the wind behind her.

But the deed giving up possession of the mines lay in the safe in the city, duly signed, sealed and delivered.

Lewis watched her through Lancaster Gate. She went into a large house, cream coloured like the others, with a built-out bay window through which he could see little mahogany tables covered with silver boxes and signed photographs. Lewis was not hungry. He wandered towards the Dutch garden which winter had hardly touched and which, thanks to the box hedges, kept its solemn lines, in keeping with the red and black brick architecture of the Palace which shelters the aged servants of the Crown. In the midst of the paved rectangle in this flowered cloister with its wistaria pergola, freed from the source of his torment, Lewis sat alone with a blackbird.

Everything encouraged him to live. The sun was tracing his majestic course; it was like Sicily. And he had got rid of a worrying piece of business.

Suddenly a cloud passed over the sun. The feeling of well-being left him. All at once Lewis felt he was seeing things as they really were. His destiny seemed to unfold itself before him.

Irene had revealed a great truth to him. He knew that the next time he saw her he would ask her to marry him.

A Gothic hall with elephant tusks and Italian cabinets made of ebony, from which the inlaid ivory bulged, loosened by the hot air from the heating apparatus; for the house was centrally heated: England was already far away.

In the drawing-room upholstered in cherry-coloured damask, on a uniform ground of crimson velvet, stood out black Khorasan enamels, minute Giordès designs and delicate Sineh whorls. The drawing-room formed a kind of atrium surrounded by a balcony of polished wood from which hung Janina embroideries, Scutari velvets and huge mosque lamps decorated with cyphers in relief. Between the windows stood an Arab saddle in violet leather braided with gold, hung with all the weapons of an emir.

Other embroideries similar to those on the walls were displayed in glass cases, but these got older and older and became finer and finer, more difficult to see and more tiring to the eyes, going back to the period of Byzantine lace.

When Lewis arrived, the company, as they say in Russian novels, consisted of Irene and three other ladies, two of whom rose to their feet. These were the old cousins of Irene, the Misses Apostolatos. They stood one on each side of their paralytic old grandmother, a kind of moody Napoléon, who, seated on a throne, followed the conversation with a vacant face but an alert eye from which her thoughts seemed to trickle. Beside her on the table was a half-finished game of patience.

Lewis expected that her three sons, the Old Jewry bankers, would be there, but none of them turned up. Sir Solon Apostolatos, the old father, came down at last in a velvet dinner jacket, preceded, as the Rhodes hangings over the door lifted, by a fiercely hooked nose kept in leash by the chain of his eyeglasses; he had bat ears, a close-cropped beard and protruding eyes like those of the gold masks of Mycenæ, and he wore a skull cap in the middle of his very scanty white hair.

In spite of his courteous greeting and the traditions of ancient Greek hospitality, Lewis summed him up as being mean, eccentric and a bully.

He pretended to be deaf to add to his authority. Irene offered him her slender cheek. He treated her harshly, as he did his daughters.

He made no allowance for youth, declared that everything easy or pleasant was wicked, upbraided his daughters for forgetting birthdays, for thinking themselves his equals and for living for nothing but pleasure, even though they were both over forty and lived like nuns. He also reproached them for being old maids, having done everything possible to prevent them from marrying; they surrounded him with fear, respect and admiration. He had once had a wife whom he killed by his bad treatment of her. With Oriental jealousy, when he had to leave her to go to the Bank he used to take down the unfortunate woman's hair and shut it in a chest of drawers, taking away the key.

They sat at an overburdened table round which an old butler carried out all sorts of funereal rites like those of the Orthodox Church, wandering about as they wander round the churches in Athens act Easter. In the centre of the table stood a bowl full of flowers whose object was not so much to decorate the table as to hide the guests from one another, thereby minimising the number of dreadful disputes and the threats of expulsion from the house that devastated the family dinner at every other course.

The food was plentiful. Oriental and heavy. But the old father, Solon, was only interested in the china on which it was served.

"And now," he said, addressing Lewis and rubbing himself to get the uric acid out of his joints, "you are going to have..."

" ... my blue and gold Vincennes; there are only seventeen pieces left. Prince V—— has two and there are three at South Kensington; I have got the other twelve, which you see here."

There was no general conversation in honour of Lewis. The only subjects discussed were family affairs, baptismal names, charity, Greek politics; austerely formal discussions on liturgy, the size of Paschal candles and so on.

Then followed long silences in which one listened to the old man munching his anti-diabetic rusks.

Lewis remarked on the beauty of their pearls. Irene explained that uncle Solon had rushed into a mad whirl of expenditure when confronted by the fall of the drachma; inasmuch as he had been thrifty all his life ("Don't handle things too much," he said; "a gold coin disappears altogether in eight thousand years"), now, feeling in his old age that the end of all economy, patrimony and capitalism was approaching, he disdained the arbitrary value of post-war money and never stopped repeating, sometimes in a frenzy and sometimes light-heartedly, "Spend the money, my children, spend the money!"

And so, without wanting to, just because they were accustomed never to dispute this man's authority, the two sisters began to squander money, returning each evening tired out, having spent the day ransacking sales, stores and antique dealers' shops, and having changed their fortune into utterly useless articles.

At night they shut themselves into, and all light out of their rooms, put on a hundred thousand pounds worth of jewelry and sat and looked at themselves in the glass.

He had two cruisers, costing two million pounds each, and a fortified villa for Venizelos with underground cellars built at his own expense for the "Cause."

"I don't want to offend you, uncle Solon," said Irene, taking the sort of liberty with him that her ancestors used to take with Jove, "but, personally, I think we ought to be more optimistic. I have given the Prefect of Athens ten thousand pounds to reconstruct the prison."

XII

THEY went into the smoking-room, and whilst uncle Solon was plunging his arms up to the elbows into a mahogany cabinet full of cigars with his name on the bands, Lewis said:—

"I have a feeling that it was in the silence of a seraglio like this in Trieste that you strangled my poor little San Lucido venture."

"Don't make fun of this house," answered Irene; "I love it just as it is. I lived here as a girl; I was a day boarder at a Maida Vale school then, and I was captain of the hockey team. I used to come back here every evening when the fog begins to thicken and when the street singers cast fantastic shadows on the walls and smile behind their make-up. Yesterday I went up to my old room under the roof; it has been empty since I left it. My bed, a very hard one, where I used to weave ridiculous dreams, still stood in the corner."

"I've forgotten now. There's a stuffed cuckoo which I brought back from Interlaken still there."

"I collect famous rooms," said Lewis. "I have already seen Cecil Rhodes' college rooms with his old cricket bat and his rhinoceros heads; Gaby Deslys' room in Knightsbridge after her death: there I found her old mother who had come from Marseilles too late, crying before a golden sun rising above a cream velvet bed; the ceiling was a painted sky in which aeroplanes were manœuvring: they were all the different machines flown by the pilot who was her lover at that time.... And again, the bedroom of the Empress Zita at Schœnbrunn, with her soap and towel just as she left them in her flight. But all this is quite beside the point...."

Irene's room was enamelled white with a green ribbon running along it like a water line, and two shiny chintz curtains covered with hollyhocks. It was what thirty years ago would have been called a symphony in white.

Her nose twitched and her narrow nostrils dilated. Her brow, swept clear of the abundant hair that grew slightly over her temples, caught the light.

"I adore your prim face with all the romance lurking in it. Give me your hand. Open it. Look, there I am in the middle of your line of Fate; here I am again after climbing this mountain. You see: I've got to get there sometime...."

"I am always told that I've got a man's hand, the hand of a pioneer, the fingers of a banker, made to handle money; will you let me alone ..."

"Your honest mouth and your Byzantine eyes, like the eyes in a peacock's tail. I don't want you to be my mistress."

"I want to stay here with you. I can't leave you any more. I want to grovel at your feet.... Tell me ..."

They spoke hoarsely, in whispers; they were struggling now, forehead to forehead, like goats. Irene kept him at arm's length to prevent him from "clinching."

At first he had made an effort not to throw himself on her, feeling that for once this was not the right way. But from force of habit he let himself go.

In falling they sank on to the bed. An English bed, that is to say a bench made of stone. Irene tightened her limbs and crossed one foot over the other for safety.

Lewis knelt on her with all his weight; the fabric of Irene's chemise tore in his hand; their hearts beat together. Their faces were red from being rubbed together so much. Lewis held one of the girl's hands behind her back and kept the other motionless beneath her chin; hairpins rained; the blue ribbons of her chemise slid off her shoulders.

She gave such a cry that he got up, a thing he had never done before for any woman.

They were both out of breath, like boxers during an interval. Irene shook out her hair and put it up again; her whole face shone from the frame of her thick mane, which looked as if it was modelled in lead: it altered her whole being: she was even more her own self.

"You're not frightened either of telling me that you are attracted to me a little?"

"For the last time.... Don't you agree that we ought to be partners in the same firm?"

Lewis saw before him the abyss of the staircase. He took a few steps and then with French impudence he turned and said:—

"I hate going like this. Give me something to take away, something that belongs to you. Not a handkerchief, it's unlucky. I know, give me your camisole. I'll keep it in my pocket book in memory of you."

"At least tell me of someone in Paris who loves you and knows you well, to whom I can talk about you."

"Well, then, promise me one thing, before going back to Trieste you will ring me up ... Ségur 5555. It's quite easy to remember."

With flaming cheeks and steady eyes Irene stood on the landing and signed to him that she did not want to talk any more.

XIII

WINTRY weather, with warm mists, good weather for the reawakening of the larger saurians. Mauve arc lamps throwing their beams on the asphalt, like lamps in recessed bedsteads shining on the sheets. The omnibuses steeped their headlights in the wood block roadway as in some deep canal.

He struck the Thames at Victoria Embankment, along which the tramway cars, bearing up from the suburbs vegetable smells and dead leaves caught in their trolley wheels, ran with great shrieking violin notes that made one shudder like the playing of a Jewish virtuoso. In the middle of the river, their noses to the tide, the barges slumbered lethargically, like sombre prehistoric animals in the silvery stream. Cleopatra's needle, whose proud erection tapered off into the fog, was balanced on the opposite side of the river by the pylon of Lipton's warehouse.

Lewis looked at Big Ben to see the time. He saw the Houses of Parliament, that Gothic prison from which all modern liberty has sprung. It was nearly midnight, the two hands being almost at the present arms. Suddenly he remembered that the Continental boat train left in twenty-five minutes. After all, what more had he to do in London?

He went to his hotel, had his luggage brought down, and caught the train without having had time to change his clothes.

The Boulogne fishing smacks leaving the harbour before dawn, their sails filled by the gentle breeze that precedes sunrise and with big fires on their bridges which threw huge shadows of the fishermen on to the sails, saw, not without some surprise, a passenger in dress clothes leaning over the prow of the steamer and towering above the spray with his silk hat.

XIV

IT is one of the great advantages of travel that one always gains forty-eight hours before and eight days afterwards by not telling anyone that one has started or returned.

Lewis did not go near Madame Magnac. He worked all day and stayed at home every evening in the hope that Irene would ring him up.

One evening, towards midnight, he had turned out the light and was thinking of her, far away, cut off from him by the sea, and yet, in this room with him (she was in his arms, he was holding her so closely that her breasts were crushed together), when the telephone bell rang. It was like a pistol shot fired beneath his pillow.

It might be Elsie Magnac. He unhooked the receiver and suddenly Irene was close to him, seemed to be sitting at the foot of his bed in the dark: she had telephoned to him whilst he was invoking her, waking him up, and taking advantage of his sleepiness to break his solitude and to insinuate herself into one of those dark corners into which one's daily worries retreat subconsciously during the night.

She seemed so close that he could almost feel her breath. It left her lips in front of her words; in a tenth of a second it crossed the earth, as dead must talk to dead, coming across the rich soil land of Kent, over Dover Castle, beneath the chalky sea, up the Boulogne sands, along the capricious windings of the Seine, over the roofs of Paris, right up to Lewis' right ear. Lewis was struck with the clearness with which one heard at night, without any roaring or buzzing. The words she spoke seemed fluid, unaffected by distance, and charged with meaning. Lewis wanted to talk to her like a friend, but he found that he only knew her well enough to call her endearing names.

That was all. They were cut off. The tragi-comedy of French administration intervened. A young woman with a dry telephonic voice asked him what his number was; then a man with a southern accent and the voice of a policeman, apparently talking from the middle of a parrot house, asked him who was calling him from London; to which he could find no answer.

The words rang emptily on the edge of the mouthpiece. Lewis felt, however, that at the other side of the Channel his words had struck home.

"Either the telephone or the distance spoils her voice," thought Lewis, "making it sound serious and taking away its charm." (Hitherto the voices that woke him up at night rang with silvery laughter, merry voices, saying, "Good morning, you"; younger voices, the staccato or husky voices of little Paris ladies.) But this voice was that of a good woman.

As Lewis was musing in the darkness of his room on the conversation which had just taken place, already finding it difficult to remember it all, so far off did it seem, almost like a conversation in a dream, the telephone bell rang sharply; it was Madame Magnac.

"My dear boy, I am glad to hear you are back. I suppose you're off again soon; all your business seems to take you so far away."

"It is the last time you will have that enchanting pleasure," replied Madame Magnac, disdainfully. "Foreign calls always have priority. Good-bye."

FOR a moment he wondered if he was going to feel hurt about it, then, as nothing of the kind happened, he leapt with joy, and his spring mattress bounced him up to the ceiling. He took his address book, his private letters, even the little red notebook, and burnt them all. A feeling of youth and self-confidence came over him, and in the silence of the small hours, gave him a glimpse of a new life in which he would be more free than he had ever been. He would be able to live quite a different life to that made up of days strung together by artificiality. An entirely new relationship with the world was unfolding itself. Irene must be his.

He opened the window. A black cat was crossing the grass plot. Factory hooters sounded in the suburbs. Lewis did not want to be alone; he dressed and went out. A lorry passed, loaded with carrots. He jumped on behind as he used to do as a boy when he went to school, in spite of severe admonitions. Dangling his legs and gnawing carrots, he crossed Paris by tortuous streets, empty save for milk cans, and never stopped till he reached the banks of the Saint-Martin canal, with its towpaths and little low houses like a Flemish port. In order to assert itself, already triumphing over the night, the light neglected nothing that it could reach, especially all the smoothest parts of the landscape, the water of the canal, the stone quays, the iron sides of the tugs. Through the idle lock gates trickled a gentle gilded grey stream of water, whose colour was not reflected from any glow in the east. The huge mass of the warehouses was mirrored in the deep crimson waters of the canal. In the holds of the barges could be heard the stamping of mules eager to resume the towpath.

Things looked so simple and natural, neither fresh nor tired, fulfilling their destinies and working towards the common end. Huge barges with their cargoes of Belgian goods slept on the deep water.

After drinking a glass of white wine, Lewis walked about waiting for the day to break and for the shutters to come down at the big Post Office in the Rue du Louvre. Then he went in and composed a reply-paid telegram to Irene on the steps. He explained that his life was over unless she would be his wife.

Then he went home, took the receiver off the telephone, drew the curtains and waited in the darkness, lying on his bed.

At midday a telegram was brought to him. He held it in his hands for a while without opening it, then pushed it under his bolster, laid it on his knees, on a chair, on the mantlepiece. At last, towards evening, he found he had enjoyed the excitement long enough. He read:—

PART THREE

"I am going to give you my freedom. I am leaving the Franco-African. Are you surprised, like everyone else? It is quite impossible to do two things well at the same time, and I have decided to love you to perfection. That will take up all my time."

"Considering the length of the journey, you are hurrying too much at the start. You must be wary."

"No. For once in your life you have found a Frenchman who is not prudent and acts without thinking of to-morrow, and you give him no encouragement. Don't think too much of me for it; it is no sacrifice for me. We live in an age when things leave us long before we leave them. I know quite well when I shall tire of happiness, but I never know when happiness will be tired of me: it took me by surprise; so I cling to it. I can easily live without doing anything; I was brought up in England. Why is it that French people always think that when a statesman is no longer in office, when an author's books no longer appear in the shop windows, or a business man neglects his office, he is going to die? Besides, it isn't as if I were going to retire into the desert. On the contrary, you know that I am at last emerging from my solitude."

"No, for bliss. In spite of appearances, I was a lonely man, that is to say a caveman, supremely selfish, hunting for his daily food, just enough for himself. I regret it now. I've written a very tactful letter to my Board of Directors, and I've got a year's holiday. As to the Company, I just asked them to let me retire into your arms. Besides, what am I leaving?"

"Don't break with anything, Lewis, believe me. Life is better without shocks. You will soon regret your work and even your friends."

"I have passed the age for having friends. By now they have all met the woman they were meant to meet. You know what women think of friendship between men: it puts them in the shade. As for work ... I have never worked. Modern business isn't work, it's plunder. I was going headlong into old age with that over-agitation and lack of activity which are typical of the present day. So far from being diminished, my resources have increased since I've had you. I am learning to become human. My first need is to adore you."

"Mine is to yield to you," answered Irene, "even though you are listless and frivolous ... but I don't regret my foolishness any more. I need you now that I have cut adrift from everything. You are my nearest relation."

From the moment Irene agreed to marry a foreigner and to leave Trieste, she also broke the bonds that tied her to her bank, her business life being only an extension of her family life; without one the other became impossible. There is no place for dreams in the counting-house homes of Greek bankers. The unexpressed devotion, the professional admiration, and the fraternal attachment which her two Apostolatos cousins had for her behind the granite walls of the Trieste mansion, in a strange atmosphere of strong room and harem, rendered precarious any form of compromise, at which, besides, she knew that she herself would never have been able to stop. Having built up her life on a basis of freedom, she considered that she had a right (without realizing how impatient she was to do so) to renounce it again.

There they both were, blissful, useless, a prey to a public happiness, depending on one another as much as offer and acceptance do. They remained suspended by a single thread above the pit dug by themselves, and they rejoiced in their danger.

What was to be done now with their victory? Save when they dressed (and in the peculiar vagrancy of dreams) they never knew a moment's solitude. There was nothing unexpected or thrilling between them, nor any room for jealousy. They belonged to each other in the most difficult of all lighting: that of happiness.

As though that were not enough they chose to leave the West and to go to Greece.

"I COME from L—— one of the northern Sporades. No, it is too small, you will only find it on German maps. I've got a marble cottage there. Don't be alarmed. It is deserted. Nobody will call on us."

They had embarked at the Galata bridge the day before, on leaving the train. A forbidding rain-swept landscape. The cupolas of the mosques were like big water-logged balloons which were unable to rise; every year the Pera sky-scrapers increase in number and add to the general depression; the river steamboats belch out clouds of Heraklian coal which grits between one's teeth, and dreary Scythian mists creep up from the Black Sea along the leaden Bosphorous. The driving rain soaked the houses of Scutari, turning their silver grey wood black.

"I suppose if the Greeks had come back to Constantinople the weather would have changed completely."

Lewis tried to tease her, but she refused to see any humour in it, concentrating in herself the undying hatred of Greek for Turk.

"You French people, with your literary flirtations with Turkey and your blindness to her infidelities, are quite intolerable. Haven't you understood the lesson of the war?" And Irene pointed with her finger to the Goeben, a worn-out, unkempt hulk, but alive once more in front of the Old Seraglio.

Irene heaved "one of those Greek sighs that make the Bosphorous tremble," as Byron says.

Their boat did not leave till after breakfast. They went up to Saint Sophia; at the gate of the mosque a sentry, before letting them in, asked them whether they were Greeks or Armenians.

The Turk barred the way ferociously, and Lewis had to produce Irene's new French passport.

"To think that we so nearly came back, we who are the guardians of Christianity in the East, and that these fanatical, besotted, dishonest Turks, who never knew how to do anything but massacre, are still here. They want to get rid of all Greeks from Constantinople! They want to have Turkish commercial houses and Turkish banks! It's too funny!"[1]

Lewis followed Irene across the prayer rugs and Byzantine paving of Saint Sophia, dragging his feet shod in immense Turkish slippers like a man on skis, and trying to keep Irene quiet. He had never seen such an exhibition of contempt in the West; it was quite different to the aversion of French and Germans, who even in their most terrible moments remained human. Five centuries of the fiercest hatred shone in Irene's eyes. She who was usually so calm could not control her fury. How could a being so closely connected with him allow herself in a single instant to be ravaged by feelings which he could not himself imagine? For the first time Lewis felt that he had bound his life to a woman of an unknown race. In the courtyard near a rococo fountain in marble and gold which ran with gleaming water, peaceable ogres wearing the new astrakhan fezes were smoking, sucking at the hookah tubes sheathed in blue velvet, amongst the circling pigeons.

After leaving Constantinople, the ship put in towards evening at Mudania, on the coast of Asia. They went on shore for a short time. Hardly had they disembarked when they came across a lorry park abandoned in an olive grove by the Greeks during their flight in the summer of 1922. Half smothered by mallows, saffron, asphodel and tobacco plants, lay the skeleton of lorries supplied by the English, their wheels in the air. Inscriptions and the number of their army corps could still be deciphered on their sides.

When Lewis woke the next morning, the steamer was leaving the Dardanelles. It was hot. The sky had become vertical; seagulls were floating on the waves as though on treetops in a waving forest, beneath a sun unthreatened by any cloud. To the left Kum Kale protected by Turkish batteries, Troy with its lizards and the coast of Asia; to the right Sedd-el-Bahr so rich in human remains. Above the surface rose the masts and funnels of sunken British troopships; a French cruiser was just finally breaking up. Vegetation had suddenly disappeared, destroyed by the extreme heat. There was nothing to keep the sky and the earth apart. The clean line of the coast and the sea like woven metal lost themselves in the distance. It was a fitting approach to the world of heroes and of gods who make love in the hollows of the sycamores. Lewis went below and entered Irene's cabin.

When they reached the bridge Mytilene was already in view, scooped out in the middle like a woman lying on her side.

III

CLINGING to a rocky prominence, warm and brown as bread-crust, seamed with long scars, and without an ounce of vegetable earth, lay the only village on the island. A flight of cobbled steps led down to the little harbour adorned by a few periwinkle-coloured boats and six empty barrels. Houses made of unbaked bricks, cracked by the midday sun, a few palms, laurels and cactus white with dust, all shimmering like glaciers. Above these was the Apostolatos house, its embrasures edged with blue, entirely built of marble inside and as cool as a glass of water. Its first owners had fled in 1818 (the women with gold coins hidden in their hair) to start trading at Odessa and later at Trieste, whilst a cadet branch established itself at Bombay. The house had subsequently been restored by Irene's two old aunts, who had lived there nearly all their lives in the greatest affection; one day they left it after a bitter and relentless quarrel; one, Hera, was a Venizelist, the other, Calliope, a Constantinian. Irene had played as a child in this drawing-room furnished with Second Empire buhl; in the room in which Lewis was sleeping her mother had died.

Lewis sat on his trunk and looked about him. There was a lithograph of King Otho on the wall and a large imaginative picture, turning black, representing the massacre of Suli, where the Greek women threw their children over a precipice rather than let them fall into the hands of the Turks. He examined the furniture; a bed, a chair, a cracked ikon, a water jar and a stove full of fruit stones dipped in resin. He looked at his dusty feet and suddenly the weariness of the week's journey came over him. Paris seemed to him all dewy, fresh and far away. Once more he was being punished for his eagerness for travel. This leap into a wild, romantic, uninhabited corner of the earth overwhelmed him. This feeling of oppression sent him to sleep.

When he awoke he was rested, that is to say comforted; night was falling; Irene was near him on the terrace, before the window, her eyes fixed on the crest of a hill from which rose the mauve wall of a leper-house.

"What are you thinking about, Irene?" She started, got up and came and knelt by him.

"I was looking at this sea which never rises or falls (it was her business woman's way of saying "this tideless sea")." "I seem, like it, to be stagnating. I am so happy that I ask myself if I oughtn't to stop living. The wise thing would be to sell out now, at the top of the market."

As the evening fell the grasshoppers made a deafening noise. From the mountain came the great holy scent of goat followed by a perfume of mint so hot and so aromatic that one thought one was wearing a sprig of it against one's chest all night.

FOR six weeks Lewis lived on this islet where Irene was the only unwithered thing. In the mornings he put on a veil and went fishing, like Childe Harold,

On his return Irene would wait for him on the quay, surrounded by children with blue shaved heads, by beggars of the old school, black, shiny and wrinkled like olives. She would have been to talk to the refugees from Asia Minor; before the lazaret, outside their tents held down by stones against the Etesian winds, those prolonged winds which bring the warmth and the birds back from the South; they had been camping there for months; the women, still wearing their baggy trousers, spun flax; men, crouching by the fires, cooked mutton on wooden skewers. The meals eaten by Lewis and Irene were hardly less primitive. The fish he caught were fried in a few drops of oil. Sweet peppers. Fruit. Water. Lewis thought longingly of snipe stuffed with foie gras, and wanted to exchange their small table for a larger one. Irene apologized, quoting a Greek proverb: "A halfpenny-worth of olives and a pennyworth of light."

Later, during the empty midday hours when the deserted street seems to waver beneath the eddies of dust where the land breeze and the sea breeze collide, Lewis took his siesta in the stillness of a kind of solar midnight. Towards five o'clock he went out on to the balcony. Just opposite lay the customs house, its miniature Parthenon front set into the ochre barracks, over which the Greek flag floated, like a sky cut into strips. Beneath the solitary eucalyptus, the proprietor of the only Ford which was for hire (ΦOPΔ) invited his friends to sit on the torn American cloth and to take long, motionless journeys. Donkeys came back from the fields, so laden that only their ears and their hooves emerged from the bundles of olive foliage. Above the leper-house rose a flat blue-patterned moon.

"How could the Greeks have lived on these rocky rafts? Was it for these remote and dreary fishermen, for this Southern European Ireland, that the whole of romantic Europe had shed her blood and her ink?" Lewis asked himself.

Twice a week he went down to the café to read Le Journal d'Athènes, edited in French. There he met officials in white linen and black-rimmed glasses who let their nails grow a yard long to show their contempt for manual labour; the lighthouse keeper who willingly lent him his telescope, out of the end of which he screwed marine panoramas, a water-melon seller, the priest with his alpaca sunshade, bearded to the eyes, his coiled hair streaming with oil, who they said had never converted anything except drachmæ into dollars. There they drank bitter coffee in little metal cups that burnt their fingers, and water so clear that the priest, giving thanks to the blue sky, made the Greek sign of the cross over it.

Alone of all Eastern nations the Greeks seem to have struck the happy mean between sluggishness and fanaticism. It is a real feat. Lewis could not accomplish it. Secretly, so that Irene should know nothing of it, seated before this sea dotted with pointed sails, Lewis was disintegrating from sheer boredom. He was succumbing to Mediterranean anæmia, had chosen sluggishness, and was letting himself drift on in a torpor akin to an agreeable demise. He really began to think that he was dead.

One morning Lewis noticed that the public square was in a ferment. Two men were standing on chairs and hurling their black fingers about. The audience was shouting and answering them with raised hands, trying to attract their attention; on inquiry Lewis found out that they were arguing about rates of insurance and that they always gambled like this at the beginning of the harvest of what are known as Corinthian raisins, which was just about to begin. He began to gamble, too. It reminded him of something.... Suddenly there before him, as in a fairy tale, stood another Greek temple also full of enigmatic gods. It was half-past twelve, and 1,500 miles away the Paris Bourse was about to open. Already the earliest quotations were being made in the street. Groups of runners, motionless as the square columns black with figures, pencil marks and caricatures, were straining at the leash. In their oak cubicles, behind green curtains, the bank representatives were taking their final orders on their private wires. Then the bell rang and pandemonium broke loose. The tide flowed in both directions up to the baskets where the orders lost their individuality, swallowed up and absorbed by cross entries, whilst in the greenish glass roof prices were already going up in columns. What a lovely toy!

Sadly Lewis longed for the West, with its sloping roofs, its rivers full of water, hard butter, the wide views of fertile country, the odourless milk, scavengers, the Bois de Boulogne full of women wearing stays, his old Martial, his spotless flat, Elsie Magnac, his other little friends, warm or cold, even Waldeck with his Lavallière tie and his little sideways hop. (Proust once said, "He looks like an aborted partridge.") The Mediterranean appalled him with its volcanic rages, its spasmodic mountains, its barren coast inhabited by sluggish people, its plains scorched like railway embankments, its hard colours, and the monotonous flow of classic torrents beneath the boisterous sun. Oh, for a little grass! He could understand the nostalgia from which Queen Sophie of Greece must have suffered when she asked permission from King Constantine, her husband, to grow ivy on the Acropolis.

This question was so tactless, so artless, that Lewis could only make a gesture of despair, without daring to lift his eyes.

"Well then ... if you love me let's go back to Paris ... just for a week. I feel I shall go mad if I don't see a cloud soon, if you can understand that."

THEY went back. It was midsummer. Paris was just like Greece: the Madeleine full of Americans, the Champs Elysées deserted, burnt up and inhabited by goats. There was a water famine. The Grand Prix had been won by a Greek.

Lewis and Irene lived an Oriental life behind closed shutters. But they were no longer on an island, and some of the warm, ribald charm of the months gone by lingered in the empty streets, and when the tourists' chars-à-bancs had disappeared there remained in the air something eager, dexterous and precious, which Paris will always retain, even when there are no more Frenchmen to live there.

They saw no one. Irene disliked people. She never spoke to them. "In Paris," she said, "people always seem to be expecting you to surprise them. I have nothing to give them. I only expect you, Lewis. So long as I am alone with you I am happy. I like the lower classes, children and animals: but here children always look ill, animals are ill-treated, and the work-people are nothing but greedy snobs."

They spent the mornings in bed. Lewis had kept some of his racehorses. He telephoned from his bed to Orne and Calvados to hear the latest about their shoes, their teeth and their tendons. The days passed, each one like the last. In the evening they emptied champagne bottles outside Paris in cardboard mills with old-fashioned bar parlours; they had foreign foods cooked at their table with so much brandy in the sauces that they ate in the midst of flames.

"We are spending money recklessly," said Irene, "and we are making none. We must think of that. Call me cheeseparing if you like."

"Bah!" answered Lewis. "It is bad enough not to have any money; but its far worse to stint oneself when one has."

They never went into Society. Lewis' marriage had been received with boisterous silence. He accepted the fact philosophically.

"Our union is far from being blessed; we cannot hope to please people. Both on your side and mine a certain number of people were annoyed, but the greater number were quite indifferent. Nothing is left but the natural hostility evoked by the sight of a happy couple and which we must get used to. If we ever want to see people again we have only to suffer some of those misfortunes which make it possible for our friends to breathe the same air as we do."

Idleness is the mother of all the vices, but vice is the father of all the arts. They began to go to museums. The one Irene preferred was the Naval Museum, because of the sailing ships. She had not the least artistic sense. She was quite happy living amongst ugly things. Of our art she only knew what the East knows: Ziem, Diaz, Meisonnier, Detaille. Lewis, who had looked up the Peloponnesian wars before going to Greece, wanted to explain French history to her. But he found that she knew the dates of the births and deaths of all our kings. Irene's idea of France was that rather faded, ridiculous and frail, but at the same time accurate and pathetic, picture of her that is given in Levantine schools. The only kind of food she liked was stuffed courgettes, pilaff of tomatoes with Corinthian raisins and sweet wines. Lewis revealed to her the secrets of French life, which are love and to have everything cooked in butter.

They never left one another. They lived quite remote from the hours of seven in the morning and seven in the evening, those iron blades which cut short the sweetest of assignations in the intimacy of heated rooms.

In love, Irene, like all Eastern women, was very frugal and had the simplest tastes. Lewis' large bed made her blush. She accepted his caresses with alarm and gave none back. When Lewis surprised her in her bath she put her hand to her mouth like a nymph surprised by a god.

"You can't imagine how you frightened me," she would say. And when he approached she gave him the nape of her neck.

"In love you must not unchain everything that sleeps in a woman," she objected. "Afterwards no one can control it. Think of the wizard's apprentice in German stories."

Like all those to whom debauchery is an old friend, Lewis felt the restraint of all this. It made Irene irresistible to him; there was so much passion in her features and even some hint of savage tendencies. And yet at every attempt he encountered nothing but prudery and a marble coldness.

Lewis exerted his experience, his subtlety and a certain low cunning. At first his results were all cut short. But he renewed his attempts. Where he had found Irene astonished now she only hesitated. He obtained more influence over her daily and he felt her yielding. At last he had to admit to himself that, perhaps to please him only, she was progressing. He did not hesitate to use her for his pleasure, without seeing that he risked spoiling her or losing her.

"How shall I put it? It is throwing paper serpentines about instead of sleeping, taking drugs or one's pleasure where one finds it."

"I worry about everything. I am not a sceptic like you. I have a terrible sense of my liabilities."

"Personally, I am a 'limited liability company,' and even then I am pessimist enough not to accept any."

"That's very practical of you. You are a pessimist, Lewis, without giving much thought to it, merely for the sake of convenience. One has no worries if one can persuade oneself that this world means nothing. You get annoyed because it doesn't amuse me to go to my dressmaker, because I refuse the slavery of a rope of pearls, because my attention wanders, so you say, when you talk to me about champagne vintages; it is really because I am ashamed of profiting by all these things now that I don't work. The more I reflect on it, the more convinced I am that the world is one complete harmonious whole. The confusion in which we find ourselves at present is only transient and it is wrong to add to it."

"You are a pessimistic optimist, and I am an optimistic pessimist," answered Lewis; "long ago I decided that we would get on as well as we could, I and my pleasure; I intend to live and die in its company, without bothering about other people."

"But that's just it: we don't, either of us. Do you think I did what I used to do out of rapacity? I did it first of all from necessity, then for my country, and lastly because, being on the earth, I have a feeling that I belong to a human association, to an austere company formed for production and economy."

"Don't scoff. I cannot bear to take without giving, to be a luxury article like other women, expensive yesterday, a nuisance to-day."

Lewis looked at her with satirical bewilderment. He was a true Parisian, whose egoism and adaptability would survive any trial. Living forcefully and carelessly in a post-war world where everything is barter and speculation, he had never put questions of this sort to himself. He thought it sufficient, in order not to be a parasite, to pay one's taxes and to have been a soldier. He wondered at Irene. He felt she was a victim of that perfect honesty, that "demon of honesty" of which the ancients talk, which dominates the construction of all Greek buildings and enables them to endure: her life, like antiquity, was imbued with the idea of "the law" which she never lost sight of Lewis was ingenuously surprised that anyone could have simple, old-fashioned ideas without being vulgar. He imagined that elegance was the exclusive privilege of corrupt natures. A prey to similar prejudices, we have seen that he had obstinately thrown himself into a kind of Jansenism of immorality. The presence of Irene ought to have pulled him out. Unfortunately, long years of uncontrolled power, both over himself and over others, prevented him from believing or obeying, just as they prevented him from reforming; he made no changes in his mode of life. He did not attempt to make Irene respect him, well knowing that one is loved chiefly for one's faults. So it was that he went on wasting his substance. But the material perfection and the method of life which he had brought to such a high pitch before his marriage, began to fail him. Childish longings and hereditary nerves began to reassert themselves. He was leading an unhealthy life.

VII

IN the weeks that followed, Irene seemed to grow much more cheerful. She went out every morning early and only came back in time for lunch. Her mail became more imposing daily. She no longer complained of feeling ill or of putting on weight. There were frequent telephone calls for her: a foreign voice would say: "Can Madame come to the téléfon?" and a long conversation would follow. Lewis, jealous of his own liberty, tried to appear to respect that of Irene; he avoided questioning her. Was it family business, or merely trifles, or love affairs? He hated to think about it. He never stopped being "worried" about it (the word takes on such a tragic meaning in the mouths of habitually indifferent people).

One morning Lewis noticed her car waiting in the Rue Cambon. He looked for the name of some masseuse or dressmaker, thinking to find Irene there; but no. A gloomy house, a sort of perpendicular steppe, with church windows round a lift shaft wrapped in a winding staircase. What could she be doing in there? And for so long, too? At half-past twelve some electricians came in from their dinner hour. Lewis examined the courtyard. The mezzanine floor seemed improper. There were pink curtains on the fifth floor. He was ashamed of spying. He who scoffed at presentiments found them everywhere.

Restless and ill at ease, he went on waiting, seated on the stairs. At one o'clock Irene came out with a large envelope under her arm. She was on her way home to lunch, five minutes late, like a man, not one of those absurd latenesses of some women. When she saw him she stopped, speechless. She got into her car (which she drove herself) but did not start it. She turned towards him and there, in the middle of the street, in that closed box, without any preamble, she explained herself:—

"Forgive me, Lewis ... I didn't dare tell you ... even though I couldn't bear having secrets from you. I have only been coming here for a few days ... yes, only a fortnight. Our Bank is opening a branch in Paris. Two floors of this building. The name isn't even up yet. Electric light is just being put in ... I swear to you that circumstances forced me into it. I heard recently that a Greek combine was going to issue in France a drachma loan in which we are interested. Our agent here is an idiot. One day, finding himself in difficulties, he rang me up to ask my advice. I cleared things up for him. The next day I went back to the Bank, and since then I have been there every day."

"Not every day," said Lewis. "Sometimes you don't go out. The day before yesterday, that headache ..."

"I never had a headache (if you only knew how nice it is not to have to tell you any more fibs). I brought some accounts home and I shut myself up in order to check them, without your knowledge."

That evening, after dinner (rain outside, the first day of fires), Lewis lit his pipe:

"I have been thinking over my adventure this morning.... It is more serious than you think, Irene. The least amusing thing in this discovery by a deceived husband is that you compel me, too, to go back to work. I don't want to in the least; but I really cannot play the Oriental who lounges in a café whilst his wife works in the fields, or, as they say in select Apache circles in the Rue d'Alésia: to let her go down to business."

"It is for your whole life, Irene. You will never give up working; you'd die if you did. Don't you see that you're a different woman since you have gone back to that Bank?"

"It's true. I regret it less than you think. It will be good for you to work, too.... You see you must do something useful. There cannot be two Europes, one living cleanly and well, and the other sleeping amongst lice and eating bark."

"Be generous. Don't wait until events prove to us that people must love each other. That sort of lesson costs too much."

In the dusk she scanned Lewis' energetic features which had begun to fill out and to lose their character since he had given up working.

"I have been telling myself that you, too, probably wanted to get your firm back into your own hands, but didn't like to suggest it because of me."

"Not at all. I was quite determined never to touch business again. Is there anything you have not lulled to sleep in me?"

"I am anxious about you. What happens nowadays to those passions, those risks, all those forceful lines that once crossed your life? Are they all sleeping, to be stirred up one day against me?"

"Tell me the truth. Have you never done a single piece of business since our marriage?"

Lewis turned the handle of the radiator tap—an act which corresponds to the old-fashioned poking of the fire.

Outside the wind was droning and tattling the slates on the roofs. Lewis leant over Irene.

"Well, let's see ... that is to say ... once, in Greece ... I don't think I ever told you ... I bought and sold the whole raisin crop of your island on margin."

VIII

SHORTLY afterwards the head office of the Apostolatos Bank in France was transferred from Marseilles to Paris. Irene accepted the appointment of general manager. The Greek firm was gradually giving up freighting and mercantile advances, and concentrating on big industrial undertakings and international finance. Thanks to this alteration of policy and to the amount of foreign capital they managed to attract, the shares of their affiliated companies, the "Olympic Chemical Produce Company" and the "Spartan Electricity Corporation" (for exploiting Thomson Houston systems in Peloponnesia), had doubled in value in a few months. The name of Apostolatos was, besides, "highly esteemed" in Paris, and the prize-bond drachma loan began to find its way on to the French market. There was only one shadow over all this prosperity, namely a strain in Græco-Italian relations arising from the seizure of a Greek steamship in the Adriatic, and which was in danger of having unpleasant results.

At the Franco-African Bank the situation was quite different. Lewis found it difficult to retrieve his position there. He had left the house in great disorder. That he might run it without any control, like a proud master, he had been careful, during his years of management, never to keep anyone else informed of what was going on, to depute nothing, to classify no papers, carrying through deals without leaving any trace of them in writing, taking the files that interested him home and not bringing them back; as soon as he left, the bold undertakings which he only kept going by his enthusiasm or his daring, began to totter. People did not hesitate to discredit him. His strokes of luck became errors, his impetuosity sheer madness. When he came back the spirit of the management had changed. A whole hierarchy of unenterprising managers and timid patriarchs had got back the upper hand and took a mean outlook on things, treating them administratively without provision for the future, feebly and apathetically. Lewis wandered amongst them like a wild beast amongst a herd of cattle. He had to employ all his recovered violence to reimpose himself on them.

Work came back like a true friend: Irene put the finishing touches to his prosperity. Lewis reasserted himself and they were convinced that they would soon be as perfectly united in their work as they were in their love.

Different interests, earlier rising, hurried meals, these would all make the hours spent together more precious. Their pleasures would become escapades; their petty worries would gradually disappear. Profit taking interrupted their tender glances, urgent clearances distracted them from the ardour which united them. The striving after perfection which wrecks even the most wonderful love would be diverted into other channels. All the marvels of business existence, its dangers, the hazards of new financial ventures, the unsettled state of foreign exchanges, the pathos of liquidations and carrying over, must establish a greater sense of quiet, abundance, and permanence between them than the most intimate and temperate life ever could accomplish.

But it was not so. These two beings who had such abundant and such natural reasons for loving one another, saw their happiness fade day by day. Lewis was both the cause and the first victim of this, for he had nothing like Irene's strength of character.

It often happened that one of them opened letters meant for the other. Irene apologised on reading the first line. But Lewis could not resist reading on to the end, even after seeing that it was an Apostolatos letter.

Irene worked without any help, transacting business in her mind whilst dressing herself; Lewis could not do without a secretary, and the head of Martial reappeared against the daily background.

Like a good many business men, Lewis knew no arithmetic, and was lost like a child in the rule of three.

"You will finish like my uncle Priam," she said. "One evening he balanced his accounts and discovered an enormous deficit, so he blew his brains out. The next day they found he had made a mistake in his calculations. He left my aunt Clytemnestra six million francs."

The telephone bell rang. Lewis unhooked the receiver with an expressionless face, but his eyes hardened.

He took umbrage at Irene's professional skill. He asked himself how she could be so self-sufficient. She was never late, and she received visits, drew up memoranda, answered letters and dictated reports without any apparent effort. Irene's office was always tidy, everything being cleared up at the end of each morning. Lewis' office was crammed with invoices and with memoranda vainly waiting for an answer. Irene was extremely generous in all her dealings ("Always give people plenty of rope," she said), especially when it was a question of dealing with Greeks. One felt that between Greeks there immediately arose a sort of understanding and that certain kinds of treachery were impossible. Lewis, on the other hand, had to travel alone, sword in hand, his eyes wide open, always on the alert in that atmosphere of western finance where bad faith predominates.

Irene came from a long line of goldsmith bankers who dealt in actual bullion. Lewis belonged to a generation which believes only in industrial undertakings, and has never even seen gold, and he despised deposit banks and deposits themselves which, however, he had no scruples about re-investing as he thought fit, if necessary even against the wishes of his customers. Irene followed tradition, considered thrift as being almost holy, had great respect for debentures and Government securities, and took the trouble to buy Members of Parliament and the Press; "... to be a banker," she said, "is to observe a thousand strict laws and never to act rashly."

Lewis, with feudal post-war pride, revolted from these slow methods: he was wrong. The union of politics and finance produce ugly children, but hardy ones.

Sometimes Lewis refused a transaction which it bored him to carry through. In this respect he was like a woman. Irene left nothing to chance; everything was grist that came to her mill. She did not forget that modern credit is the granddaughter of usury. She made use of other people's leavings. She took care not to trespass on Lewis' territory (similar enterprizes in the Mediterranean often caused their interests to overlap). But if Lewis handed her over a deal to see what she would do with it, Irene applied herself to it and favourable results soon appeared. Then Lewis regretted it. Although he proudly concealed the fact, Irene saw through him and in her frank way offered not to go on with it. But he, sulkily, would not learn his lesson; he found it difficult to forgive.

Certainly the admiration he had for Irene never abated; but sometimes he had bitter thoughts about her.

He reproached himself for them; but the images he tried to banish from his mind merely returned with greater frequency.

He was on the point of telling her all about it, and to explain to her that it was a question of examining some very attractive offers from an American combine with a view to establishing wireless communication with Asia Minor and even Persia. But, perhaps in order to intrigue Irene—believing her to be as jealous as he was—perhaps, even though she was discretion itself, in order that no word of the matter should leak out, he said nothing.

That evening, seized with remorse, he took up the tale where he had left it in the morning.

"I hadn't time to explain. I invited two American bankers to luncheon. They have just come from London ..."

"Isn't it about the wireless in Asia Minor?" interrupted Irene. "Be very careful; your people have not, as they pretend, got the Marconi Company behind them. They came to me with it a week ago and I made some inquiries. It is not a serious proposition."

In less time than one could imagine the intercourse between them began to lose sincerity. On Irene's side it was because she felt that her husband was drifting away from her. On Lewis' side it was because at every turn he found her to be his master. He had the impression of continuing a struggle against an intimate and skilful adversary who had made him bite the dust at their first encounter. That enterprise of the San Lucido mines which had brought them together by separating them, and of which a few months earlier Lewis could not think without emotion because it had been the origin of his happiness, now humiliated him as it prospered more and more: he found himself loathing it when he read that it was entering on its second financial year, that the profits had been most satisfactory and that there was quite a possibility of a dividend being declared.

He remembered on that occasion that it was the anniversary of their meeting in Sicily. He promised himself that he would take Irene some of the pungent and intoxicating jasmin of that first evening.

THE afternoon on which Lewis went to his florist to order the jasmin, chance, our worst enemy, brought Madame Magnac there, too. One cannot live in the closest intimacy with anyone for several years without acquiring a certain number of tradesmen in common. Elsie! In a flash she became again the plenipotentiary of pleasure, the woman at the same time stately and ludicrous, as elegant and up to date as ever; and everything else that Lewis wanted Irene to be, and which she was not. He stopped thinking that a legal wife is sufficient to console a man for all his mistresses. He felt that Elsie had become necessary to him again. Between them there was no question of quarreling, of separation, of points of honour or of equity. With the true spirit of worldliness and tact, Madame Magnac spoke to him as though she were continuing a conversation interrupted by chance the day before.

"Above all, don't come at the apéritif hour if it bores you, though you'll always be most welcome.... News? Marbot is in bed with his hind-quarters full of buck shot. Harbedjan put them into him a fortnight ago at Sologne. If the Armenians start massacring ..."

The florist's assistant interrupted them. She had been unable to get jasmin anywhere.

"Never mind," said Lewis, crossly. "Give me anything you've got; a lettuce if you like ..."

Lewis had been at Madame Magnac's for an hour, stretched on a divan; she went on, sitting by him, in the same airy tone of voice:

"Everyone says you've got a charming wife, Lewis; like a Ravenna mosaic.... So you want me to be the last person to know her? I am sure I shall like her very much."

"Come, Lewis.... Besides it appears that she is a marvellous business man. Do let me know her."

LEWIS left Madame Magnac and went home on foot to disperse various scents which seem to have soaked into his skin. He was very late for dinner. Irene was stretched out in front of the fire, her head in her hands. Lewis thought she was crying, and took hold of her fingers. No, Irene never shed tears, but she was obviously forcing down her sorrow.

"When I come in," said Lewis, with infantile ferocity, "I like you to be pleasant. You're about as jolly as a dishonoured cheque. What is the matter?"

"I've been alone a long time this evening, and I know now that I was wrong to go back to business. Now it's too late to retrace my steps. It isn't a game which one is free to take up and drop again at will. Laziness is an accomplishment which only makes one more frivolous. Work is a hard law with serious consequences which I am only just beginning to realize...."

"Everything that happens is my fault," continued Irene, "even to have agreed to marry was wrong of me; and yet people say I am stubborn! I had an idea that ... I want to explain something to you which you daren't admit to me: that you married to be happy and quiet, not for your house to be turned into a bank, a counting-house; what did I say? Two Banks. To-day I am your competitor, and to-morrow? Perhaps in marrying me you were only seeking revenge, and having got it, you only asked to live in peace; in your heart, Lewis, you care for me much less than you think. Unfortunately, it's I who love you now ... (she stopped him interrupting), but that is my own affair. Give up work? You have seen me try, I can't go on doing nothing. I am a Greek, and for me every dream, every thought, must materialize. My ancestors of the Islands lived for centuries in the midst of carnage and outlawry on that very island on which you could not live. I, too, am an island, something very primitive and remote, and you cannot live there either. I hate everything which is merely amusing or childish. Vice, whether it be splendid or convenient, does not attract me. I have behind me centuries of trade, of liberty, of emigration.... Let me go away in my turn ..."

"You would leave me like this ... without warning? When we are such friends, Irene?"

"No, not friends. I haven't time to wait for the affections of old age. Don't make any mistake. You are not a Russian to stagger across the flow of your feelings, crying out: 'Everything I touch crumbles.' Don't turn your back on the truth. The motto of humanity should be: 'Behold the truth, now everyone for himself!' The Greeks are the only exception. What are we, we two? During the day we are enemies. During the night ... yes, during the night also, but there we cannot choose our weapons. We can't go on like that. It will become too much of a strain. The path we are following is strewn with unhappiness! You with your character: civilized, nervous, often unreliable; and I with mine, full of savage instincts, passionate ..."

Lewis did not reply. This child was very dear to him at heart. He took her in his arms and passed his hand between her dress and her body.

Irene remained powerless, her head on Lewis' knees, like a little Greek city intoxicated by its tyrant.

THUS Lewis realized that Irene, with all her pride, could not resist him. He thought "They say that modern women cannot find men; they will always find plenty to make love to them, but what they won't find is the man who has time to sit beside them and put his arm round them and say: 'Why are you unhappy?'"

What puzzled him was that this melancholy conversation, with its hint of rebellion, should have occurred at the very moment when he first began to drift away from her. When we live in close intimacy with anyone, something more subtle than conscience tells us about him, and our actions, when they appear to us most inexplicable are often the result of a mysterious logic.

Irene and Lewis took up their life together again, but a strong barrier was growing up between them without their knowledge.

"If I were as frank as you are we would have stopped being happy long ago; of course we'll be happy, we must be."

"Be patient. Don't live on the precious capital of your nerves. Life would be intolerable without sorrow. Would you like me to take you into Society? There are all kinds of quite new things to do there, all sorts of amusing or gorgeous sights which you have always refused to have anything to do with. People in the mass are a bore, but taken individually this is not so true. You are certainly not 'sociable,' as old ladies say; but there is no necessity for you to see old ladies. Won't you try a little pleasure?"

It struck Lewis with satisfaction, but not without resentment, that he had never taken such trouble with a woman. That is to say, he paid her those little attentions which are really only parlour tricks, and which he mistook for the impulses of his heart.

They went to dark houses on the left bank of the river, light houses on the right bank, hotels, theatres, concerts. They went away from balls at an hour when in the deserted streets the footmen shout out names famous in the history of France. For the first time since their marriage Lewis and Irene went the rounds of polite society in the autumn season.

Irene was a great success. Paris did not lack business women, but they were all clever dressmakers, lucky actresses, shrewd concierges, publicity agents; they all worked clumsily, with no more originality than a cook making jam, their only aim being to make money, to be received in Society, and to entertain well-known men, thus showing the limitations of their ambitions.

Irene pleased people by her charm, her disregard of the technique of finance, her straightforward methods, her simple and imperious character. She was sought out by everyone; Lewis was never jealous. Important people asked to be introduced to her. Amongst them the Italian Chargé d'Affaires, who was fond of pretty women, but who immediately regretted it because it was on the eve of the Græco-Italian conflict, and Irene turned her back on him.

Irene was not affected by her success. What she really liked was to stay at home and to entertain a few intimate Greek friends. When Lewis came home he would hear a guttural conversation punctuated by twitterings coming from the drawing-room; a committee meeting of a Philhellenic benevolent society. He could not understand a word, his recollection of Greek roots being quite useless. Olympus made a noise like a duck-pond. He would fly after catching sight of four or five people amongst whom was aunt Clytemnestra, all very dark and very rich, with blue eyebrows, eyes like chocolate caramels and emeralds the size of paving stones or diamonds like heaps of pounded ice on their fingers.

He would shut himself in his study, put his feet up on his table and think of Irene, wondering how he could give her proofs of his affection and at the same time get even with her.

XII

Dividends.	Previous Closing.	Name of Security.	Opening Price.	Closing Price.
70	1,065	Apostolatos Bank	1,080	1,106
	540	Franco-African Bank	535	510

XIII

THREE weeks after issue the Greek loan had been doubly subscribed at the offices of the Apostolatos Bank alone. One evening Irene and Lewis decided to celebrate this success and to emerge from their solitude.

Irene wore a silver tissue dress which contrasted with her face, deepening the warmth of her Oriental complexion: she was black and silver like the ikons of her country.

"How perfect she is," thought Lewis, going to fetch her in her room, and looking at her lithely curving body beneath the clinging dress.

They dined, too well, in the midst of dancing, rounded shoulders, and machine-like dinner jackets. Irene compared these stars from the Rue de la Paix, the laughter and the surfeit of make-up, with Trieste in the evening, with its two cinemas and the officers wrapped in their capes stalking up and down before the Café du Veneto. The whole evening they wandered from one cabaret to another, from the Rue Caumartin to Montmartre. Up there Lewis met some friends.

Whilst a dancer, caught in a bundle of limelight rays, was carrying his partner off round his neck like a deer, Irene found herself being introduced to a handsome, self-possessed, slightly faded woman with a geranium-coloured mouth and sly eyes, who immediately took an interest in her.

Lewis had often spoken of her. Without ever having met her Irene had taken a dislike to her.

What wrong opinions one can form of people! Elsie Magnac was charming. They became friends at once. She joined their party. They danced and drank together.

Towards one o'clock they found themselves, all three, on the Place Pigalle. The open air smote them. The carriages were half asleep; the luminous signs were becoming lethargic.

The car slid down the slopes of Montmartre, whitened by the snows of cocaine, through the streets lit up like a harbour in that feast of electricity punctuated by the spasmodic nervous jerkings of sky signs. Russian cabarets faced Argentine ranches, Moorish cafés and Brazilian dives stood opposite Caucasian cellars and Chinese restaurants. Occasionally, overwhelmed by this cosmopolitan glut, a gaunt scared Frenchman stole along.

Irene was seated between Madame Magnac and Lewis. She was conscious of them looking at each other behind her back, and uttering soundless words to each other. When Madame Magnac left them they went up to their rooms. Irene faltered and almost collapsed. She felt herself spinning like a Dervish: Lewis seemed to be all round her. She no longer had the strength to resist some force, some sequence of events which followed each other inevitably. She wanted to say to her husband: "Don't leave me, I feel so ill at ease, so wretched this evening." But he seemed so overwrought, so anxious to leave her that her courage failed her.

He went out. Irene felt stifled. She opened the window. The night was green and bitter as an apple. The street shone emptily. Only a red light glowed like some mysterious fire grate: the rear lamp of a car. With a feeling of uneasiness Irene went back into her room, put out the light and leant on the window sill once more.

A few moments later the house door opened and a man came out. There was no doubt about it; it was Lewis. He went towards the car standing a little way down the street. Then he stopped and looked up. Reassured, he opened the door of the car. Beneath the electric street lamp Irene saw Madame Magnac's hand, limp and white, as if it had Been severed. The car drove away.

XIV

"HAVEN'T you ever played tricks on those you love," thought Lewis, answering an imaginary antagonist, as he walked along the quais by himself. The night, deep as coffee grounds in which he could foretell no future, was over. He had spent it with Madame Magnac, as in the old days. Now he was on his way back to Irene for breakfast. What he liked about Irene was her purity; he had adored that purity for so long that he could not bear it any more. Indeed it protected Irene, unfairly he thought, from everything; it protected her from suspicion, from danger; it enabled her to remain herself; never to make an effort to serve him or to understand him; she went to bed completely enveloped in this carapace.... To go on living in Paris after the age of thirty one must accept being surrounded by complicity. Otherwise one must leave. Since Irene had agreed to come back to France, she must sooner or later get used to it.

Lewis used to think that the peccadillos which seemed to him necessary with women who only attracted him physically, would automatically cease if he ever really fell in love. He had counted without that eagerness to surpass ourselves which dominates us and which is perhaps nothing but habit disguised.

HE was simplifying it more than he imagined, for when he got home he found the house empty. He waited for two days. Then seized with a remorse and despair of which he would not have been thought capable, in forty-two hours he scoured Paris, London and Trieste. But without result. There was not the slightest trace of Irene.

On the eighth day he received a telegram from her asking him to come and join her at Corfu.

Would she forgive him? No pilgrimage would have been too long for him if she would relieve him of his misery. With some difficulty, the relations between Italy and Greece still being strained, he obtained a permit, and after further efforts he succeeded in getting on board an Italian vessel at Brindisi, laden with troops.

The next day at sundown Corfu appeared, set in the swelling sea. In the leaden channel they dipped their ensign to Count Cavour, Julius Cæsar, Saint Mark, Leopardi and all kinds of Italian celebrities painted iron-grey, armed with naked guns trained on the old citadel protected by its interlacing vines. The principal buildings sought shelter under the white flag. The whole town was peacefully doing its laundry. The Italians had just declared a blockade against the island.

At the Hôtel de la Belle Venise, Lewis heard that the Greek ships with their passengers were confined to the south, in the Khalkiopoulo Bay. He went there at sunset.

It was raining. Confusedly, in the westerly wind, the Greek destroyers with their financiers' names and their metal masts through the lattice work of which the sky shone like new wine, jostled transport ships, cargo boats from Patras, unable to proceed on their journeys, and even feluccas laden with flour and asphalt stopped in their island coast trade and guarded by searchlights from Italian hydroplanes.

Like a belated sailor returning to his ship, Lewis, in a boat rowed by two men on the bilious sea, was looking with the aid of a pocket lamp for the Basileus II, on board which Irene was. In the darkness he strayed amongst screw-blades, beneath the stiff figure-heads and amongst the anchor cables; one heard concertinas, forecastle songs, the creaking of masts and the barking of dogs on the sailing ships. A trimmer emptied a scuttle of clinkers almost on top of him. Idle passengers, to relieve the boredom of quarantine, gazed at him over their black bulwarks and cursed him in Greek.

At last a searchlight swung the night round and the word Basileus II appeared on a poop in letters of gold.

XVI

HE found her in her cabin. A bunk with a wooden frame, a screwed-up porthole, washing soaking in the basin, open trunks. A fan churned the exhausted air. He faltered:

"I know.... Don't let's waste time. I have something important to say to you. Come on to the upper deck."

On the upper deck they had difficulty in keeping their feet for the wind seemed to seize them by main force; the ship was straining at her anchors. In the distance an intermittent flash of red alternating with green. Above them the lifeboats hanging like black airships in the empty sky, lit up for one moment by stars; round the ship the sea was making a noise like nuts rolling about.

"We were held up by the Italians. I embarked, at Marseilles, I was going to Athens ..."

"Don't you understand that I am no longer your wife? I didn't ask you to come here on this January night merely to tell you that that account between us is closed for ever. Once again, don't let's waste time. Here are some telegrams from Trieste. They confirm information we have received during the last few days. You are aware of the political situation. You know that the Italians have been disappointed in their demand for an indemnity against us. To-day they are having their revenge. It is just like them. They are going to put an embargo on all Greek property in Italy. We shall be compelled to sell San Lucido just at the moment when it is doing well. After all, that is what the Italian Government cannot forgive us. We bought the mine at a period when Italy was half Communist, the victim of a depreciated currency. To-day we are facing a Nationalist Italy, foreigner-hating, intoxicated with her 'Rights.' The Credito Milanese with whom we are in close touch, and of whose Fascist leanings you know, has been making proposals in which their threats are ill-concealed, to buy us out."

"Cannot you arrange a fictitious transfer of stock and administration by a third party until the crisis has passed?" asked Lewis.

"No, what they want is that the undertaking should no longer be in Greek hands. It is a policy which they are extending to the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean. We have no choice. Read the telegrams; we must sell immediately at the best price we can."

"They are not too good. But at any rate they are the best we can get. But, you understand, we will never sell to Italians. To come to the point. What I propose is this: are you disposed to take it over again?"

This San Lucido enterprise had come and gone in his life during the past year like an absurd romantic refrain. He saw again the glittering sea and a young woman sounding with brown arms. He saw again the pure profile of the Sicilian hills and the shimmering blue sky. A cry burst from him, the first in his life:

"Come. You heard what I said. Think it over. Let your words be measured by the thought that this is our last conversation. Make your calculations. That is what you are here for. It was much more difficult for me to ask you to come ..."

Irene in her turn felt herself weakening under the bitterness of their words. But she controlled herself.

"Let us try to keep the balance between insolence and affliction, if you don't mind?"

"Here we are," she went on, "back in life as single combatants. Let us play our parts. Let us fight a good battle."

"You must stop before you utter that word, which would make the heavens fall on us. Love is not made for you or for me. For a moment I allowed myself to be on this earth for something else than to labour: my punishment was bound to come. Do you want the mine, yes or no? Answer me."

"I shall have to think it over," said Lewis. "In any case we could not take over the shares diluted last June except at par. As to profits carried into the reserve, I am afraid these cannot be taken into account..."

"Sorrow does not confuse his mind," thought Irene. "His conditions are even harder than those of the Italians."

XVII

THE Apostolatos Bank sold the San Lucido mines. The Franco-African bought them at the lowest possible price, with the tacit consent of the Italian Government (with whom, by the way, they concluded an important financial pact in Asia Minor). During the whole time the negotiations were going on, and they were long, only an impersonal correspondence passed between the two houses; but Irene first, and then Lewis, drafted and signed for each other various notes and memoranda which kept them constantly in communication. As these conversations carried on from a distance became gradually more steady, carried on without jarring note or passion, their views on business policy in the Mediterranean were soon found to be identical in many particulars. Their interests began to coincide. The results were profitable, just as though Fate, which had done its utmost to separate them and to prevent them from being happy, was eager to give her blessing to this financial union and to make their fortunes as soon as they consented to give themselves only to an ordinary life. Fickle fortune ministered to them. They sometimes wondered why they had not always worked together; all their constraint fell from them and they went so far as to admit that if they had been destined to love perfectly they would probably at the moment be standing amongst the ruins of their fortunes. For Love never hesitates to ruin the lives of those who do not want him.

Since Corfu, Lewis and Irene have never seen one another, but they write to each other every day.

XVIII

Everyone knows that there has for some time been talk of a fusion between the Apostolatos Bank of Trieste and the great French firm, the Franco-African Bank; we think we may safely say that this will soon be an accomplished fact. The new combine will take the title of MEDITERRANEAN CONSOLIDATED. In the course of the Extraordinary General Meeting, which is to take place next month, it will be suggested, if our information is correct, that the shareholders shall be entitled to receive one new share for two old ones, and one new share for four old ones, of the Apostolatos Bank and the Franco-African, respectively. Shortly after these come on the market, which will be about January, we are confident that the shares of the new combine will be quoted so favourably that they will be sought after as gilt-edged securities.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lewis and Irene

LEWIS AND IRENE

CONTENTS

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

LEWIS
AND IRENE