Chapter III: 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._)