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Title: Lewis and Irene
Author: Paul Morand
Translator: Vyvyan Beresford Holland
Release Date: June 26, 2023 [eBook #71047]
Language: English
Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by
Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEWIS AND IRENE ***
LEWIS
AND IRENE
A NOVEL BY
PAUL MORAND
_Translated by_
H. B. V.
CHATTO & WINDUS
LONDON
1925
_By the same Author_
OPEN ALL NIGHT
CLOSED ALL NIGHT
_Guy Chapman: London_
CONTENTS
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
I
"FIFTEEN," said Lewis.
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.
"Forty."
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.
"Who will you have with you?"
He smiled.
"... Proof."
"The Franco-African is and will always be a house of crystal."
"Then it will break."
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."
The old man looked at him uncomprehendingly, but his face was purple.
"You are going to reduce me ..."
"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).
II
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.
Lewis knew him of old.
"Why! Its 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 ...
"Allow me to precede you along the road to show you the way.
"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:
"Any trace of mercury?"
"I don't think so."
"Any barytes."
"Yes."
"What do you want for your option?"
"A thousand pounds sterling."
"When do you want to know by?"
"Now, at once. Otherwise I start at three o'clock for London by
aeroplane."
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.
IV
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.
The conversation went on.
"Love," observed the Prince de Waldeck, "is no longer the highly
technical trade it used to be."
"It's like everything else, there's no time for it."
"People have forgotten how."
"Personally," put in Elsie Magnac, "I don't believe that any men are
indifferent. It is women who are clumsy."
V
LEWIS shrugged his shoulders to show that he considered the conversation
dull.
"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.
"Of course: you know your way."
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?
"What did Fidius close at? What was the street price?"
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."
Having said this, Lewis went home.
VI
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.
No, he would go alone.
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.
"I don't care a damn," he wrote to Martial, "for the inner meaning of
things."
Lewis liked leaving France if he did not like leaving Paris; "this
cosmo_im_politan," 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
"_Ma présentation, en cette tenue de maraudeur
aquatique, je la peux tenter, avec l'excuse
du hasard._"
(S. MALLARMÉ, _Le Nénuphar blanc_.)
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:--
"Do you mind?"
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.
"No, madame. But I am out of breath. Out of training. Too many cigars."
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.
She wiped the salt from her eyes.
Hornets were flying about just off the ground. Lewis waved towards the
sea, beneath violet patches on which sunken rocks were hidden.
"Since you have beaten me, you owe me my revenge."
"You will have that this evening, monsieur," she replied in French.
IX
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."
He added lyrically:--
"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.
As though guessing his thoughts the Italian stopped him.
"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."
"May I ask by whom?" asked Lewis.
Pastafina hesitated a moment.
" ... By the Apostolatos Bank of Trieste."
X
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.
Would he ever see her again?
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:
I met a mermaid swimming in the sea.
And the taste of seaweed lingers in my mouth.
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.
XI
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).
_Banque Apostolatos_
_Trieste._
Someone was asking to see him. He was just about to say that he was not
in when he changed his mind.
It was she.
"I come to see you as a neighbour. I am in the annexe."
Lewis greeted her, congratulating himself on the unexpectedness of the
thing. Then he said suddenly in a formal voice:
"What have you got to do with the Apostolatos Bank?"
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."
"But now that I have signed?"
"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."
"Do you mind if I put out the light? It attracts the mosquitoes," he
said.
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.
She went on:--
"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.
The jasmin suddenly made its double perfume felt.
"I am very sorry, madame," he said, "but everything you suggest is
impossible. We have decided to develop the property ourselves."
PART TWO
I
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."
Was Lewis in love with Irene?
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.
II
MADAME MAGNAC was not the least of these.
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.
IV
FROM a taste for poverty, Lewis began to spend a great deal of money.
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.
V
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?"
Lewis replied: "I have work to do for which I am not sufficiently
equipped."
"What work?"
"Indulgence, patience and the confutation of errors."
"Poor old chap," decided Martial, "I don't know who it is, but you've
certainly got it badly this time."
VI
"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.
What reply would he get to these overtures?
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.
IX
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 conditions were as follows:--
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.
At this moment a boy brought in a message.
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."
X
"ARE you going back to the West End?"
"I am going further. I am staying with my uncle Solon in Bayswater,"
said Irene.
"Let me drive you back."
"I'd much better drive you back to your hotel; I've got a car."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I want to talk to you," said Lewis, bluntly.
"Very well, then."
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.
"And now?"
"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."
"And you are a good business man because you know when you are beaten."
"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."
There was a short pause.
"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.
Lewis saw that he had hurt her. He grew calm at once.
"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?"
Irene could not get past his previous statement.
"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."
She interrupted him.
"Don't treat it as a joke."
"Surely when one has being doing serious business one can laugh
afterwards? Would you rather I sulked over my defeat?"
"You always fall on your feet like a cat.... I don't like dreamers."
"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?"
Irene shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh! dear, no."
"That's just what I thought," answered Lewis.
* * * * *
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.
"How cold it is now that she is gone," he thought, "how bored I am!"
Irene had revealed a great truth to him. He knew that the next time he
saw her he would ask her to marry him.
XI
THE next evening Lewis dined with the Apostolatoses in Bayswater.
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.
"Please accept my compliments," he said.
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..."
Lewis waited expectantly for a tale of some noble vintage.
" ... 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.
Uncle Solon was repeating himself.
"In three years' time the entire organization of the world will have
changed."
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."
"Ah I to my jealous lord let my poor head be borne."
"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."
"What sort of dreams?"
"I've forgotten now. There's a stuffed cuckoo which I brought back from
Interlaken still there."
"I want to see it, this room of yours."
"Why?"
"Just because ..."
"Just as you like," said Irene simply, without waiting to be begged.
"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.
Lewis went up to her.
"You are still only a girl."
She stepped back.
"Let me alone."
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.
Lewis put his hands on her shoulders.
"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 slim figure, your long neck, your slender arms, your narrow
waist..."
"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."
"Let me alone."
"Will you marry me?"
"Certainly not. I've been married once; that's enough for me."
"Irene, I think of nothing but you. I live only in expectation ..."
"Let me alone."
Lewis' hands began to make dark bracelets round Irene's wrists.
"I want to stay here with you. I can't leave you any more. I want to
grovel at your feet.... Tell me ..."
"Let me alone."
"Let me destroy you, burn you down and build you up again."
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.
"Let me alone."
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.
"Let me alone, you're killing me!"
She gave such a cry that he got up, a thing he had never done before for
any woman.
"Forgive me," he said.
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.
"Naturally," said Lewis, "we shall never meet again after this."
"Why not? I'm not frightened of you."
She was bubbling over with emotion.
"You're not frightened either of telling me that you are attracted to me
a little?"
"No."
"You're not angry with me?"
"I'm angry with myself for standing here calmly like this."
"Cut your hair off."
"Never."
"For the last time.... Don't you agree that we ought to be partners in
the same firm?"
Irene smiled.
"No. Anything but that. Say good-night nicely like an Englishman and
go."
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."
She looked at him in bewilderment. She had never met a man like him
before.
"At least tell me of someone in Paris who loves you and knows you well,
to whom I can talk about you."
"I don't know anyone in Paris."
"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.
She watched Lewis go down the stairs.
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.
Lewis had completely forgotten Irene.
As each wave broke Lewis thought of Irene.
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.
"Have you been thinking of me, Irene?"
She answered in a low constrained voice:--
"Of course."
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.
"I am quite close to you, Irene."
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.
A few minutes later Irene got through again.
"I've got nothing more to say," she said, "have you?"
"Nor have I. I love you."
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.
"No," she said, and hung up the receiver.
"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."
"Off again? Never, now that I have heard your voice," said Lewis.
"It is the last time you will have that enchanting pleasure," replied
Madame Magnac, disdainfully. "Foreign calls always have priority.
Good-bye."
After which Lewis found himself alone again.
XV
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:--
LONDON. 22.11.22. 14331 A.
Let's try.
Irene.
PART THREE
I
"IRENE, I've got a present for you," said Lewis.
"What is it?"
"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."
"It's a dangerous outlook for me," replied Irene. "Imagine my anxiety."
"Since you are my wife ..."
"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."
"Which is preparation for boredom."
"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.
II
"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.
"In Turkey," said Irene, "it always rains."
"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.
"But I'm not standing up for the Turks."
"Yes, you are."
"I'm not."
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.
"I am a Greek subject," answered Irene proudly.
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.
"A whole Greek division surrendered here," explained the guide.
"Let's go. I'm going back on board," said Irene.
Her eyes were full of tears.
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.
"Come up quickly," he said. "Here is the Mediterranean, your mother
sea."
When they reached the bridge Mytilene was already in view, scooped out
in the middle like a woman lying on her side.
[Footnote 1: The author does not hold himself responsible for the
opinions held by his characters.]
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.
IV
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,
Warming himself like any other fly.
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.
But Irene joined him, and while yet far off said anxiously:--
"You seem depressed; aren't you happy?"
This question was so tactless, so artless, that Lewis could only make a
gesture of despair, without daring to lift his eyes.
"Profoundly happy," he answered.
"I am asking you for the truth."
"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."
V
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.
Lewis, from habit, tried to rally her to pleasure.
"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.
"What exactly is meant by going on the loose?" asked Irene.
"How shall I put it? It is throwing paper serpentines about instead of
sleeping, taking drugs or one's pleasure where one finds it."
"What, exactly, do you mean by that?"
"Oh! nothing."
"I don't understand," said Irene, puzzled.
VI
LEWIS surprised Irene before her mirror.
"I'm getting fat," she said. "You are making a Turkish woman of me."
"Why worry about 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."
"No, Lewis, it's no good being cunning. You can leave that to
tradespeople."
"Things always arrange themselves."
"Yes, but not always as we want them to."
"Then why work at all?"
"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."
"What a pity it is that one cannot take everything you say down in
writing!"
"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.
One evening, after dinner, Lewis yawned.
"The 'Côtes de Gaillon' races are to-morrow," he said. "Are you
coming?"
"Our life is perfectly absurd," was all Irene replied.
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."
Lewis said nothing for a moment, then he began to laugh:
"And I used to believe in drug cures!"
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 only for a fortnight more ..."
"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?"
Irene came and sat on the floor beside him.
"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."
"I seem to have married a copy of the 'Civil Progress.'"
"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."
Lewis hastened to be insincere.
"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?"
"Don't be frightened. I soon forget."
"Do you remember? You used to call the Bourse your playground."
"I've grown a lot since then. I no longer require to play."
"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.
" ... No," he answered.
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.
Irene made fun of him:
"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.
"It's for you, darling," he said.
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.
"Irene," he used to say, "you represent monopolies and extortion."
"And you," she retorted, "stock jobbing and speculation."
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.
One morning Lewis said to Irene:
"I shan't be in to-day. I've got a business lunch on."
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.
IX
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."
"That's too much already."
"Come, Lewis.... Besides it appears that she is a marvellous business
man. Do let me know her."
"Later on."
She murmured close to his ear, laughing:--
"After all, perhaps it would be an easy way to fix things up?"
X
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...."
Lewis made a movement of impatience to avoid a sermon.
"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 ..."
Lewis took hold of Irene's hair, fine as magneto wires.
"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, your name does mean Peace, doesn't it?"
Irene remained powerless, her head on Lewis' knees, like a little Greek
city intoxicated by its tyrant.
XI
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.
Irene never tried to check her thoughts:
"I don't think we shall ever succeed in being happy."
Lewis became exasperated:
"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."
Then he took her hands in his and comforted her.
"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
OFFICIAL QUOTATIONS
Dividends. Previous Name of Opening Closing
Closing. Security. Price. Price.
70 1,065 Apostolatos 1,080 1,106
Bank
540 Franco-African 535 510
Bank
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.
There were no half-measures in their celebration.
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.
At the first opportunity she asked Lewis her name.
"Why, it's Elsie Magnac."
Lewis had often spoken of her. Without ever having met her Irene had
taken a dislike to her.
"I don't even like to think of her being alive," she told Lewis one day.
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.
"I will drive you home," said Madame Magnac.
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.
With a soft grace and supreme awkwardness she threw herself at his
knees:
"I hate that woman! Swear that you will never see Madame Magnac again!"
Lewis reassured her with feline callousness.
"Of course not, if you don't want me to."
She threw her arms passionately round him.
"Now you must go to sleep," he said.
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.
No, he was not complicating his life, he was simplifying it.
XV
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:
"Irene!"
"Don't touch me!"
"But you sent for me ..."
"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.
"Why are you here?"
"We were held up by the Italians. I embarked, at Marseilles, I was going
to Athens ..."
"To escape?"
"Of course."
"Irene, do forgive me."
"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."
"What conditions does the _Credito Milanese_ offer you?"
"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?"
"What a shifting venture ..." thought Lewis.
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:
"Irene! don't leave me!"
"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 ..."
"You needn't go on. I have already had proof of your pride."
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?"
Softer thoughts passed between them after this.
"Here we are," she went on, "back in life as single combatants. Let us
play our parts. Let us fight a good battle."
"Irene, I lo ..."
"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..."
And he broke down, sobbing.
An oily moon came out of the clouds and appeared through the rigging.
"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
GOSSIP FROM THE BOURSE
_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._
(_Financial Information._)
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEWIS AND IRENE ***
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