Chapter II: 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.