CHAPTER XVIII

PART ONE

I

"FIFTEEN," said Lewis.

The morning papers predicted mist with occasional showers from the

Atlantic. In spite of this the morning presented a cloudless sky, though

it had been a little late in producing it. The Paris sycamores persisted

in their homage to the autumn; hardly were their leaves swept up than it

had to be done again.

"Fifteen and fifteen, thirty," went on Lewis, catching sight of a

beautiful outward curling beard which came to join the imperial of his

next-door neighbour, the general, each of whose statements began with

the expression: "Upon my soul and honour ...!"

It was the first funeral since the return from the holidays. Nobody had

yet had time to get back their pallor; from starched collars and

mourning dresses protruded the tanned cheeks and sunburnt hands of the

congregation.

Whilst the black-moustached undertaker's men were emptying the contents

of the hearse on to the bier and carrying the be-ribboned wreaths and

other floral expressions of regret one by one into the church, the

organ, like a concertina in the hands of some inebriated and tearful

sailor, sent its gigantic windy harmonies soaring amongst the church

hangings, beneath the vaulted roof and right out into the street. The

beadles with their glittering halberds pierced like absinthe spoons,

towered above all the bald heads. The footmen of the deceased, in their

amethystine livery, and holding their top-hats in their hands, added to

the majesty of the scene. One felt that the least touch of sorrow would

have impaired and the least incivility have shattered the good humour of

this obscure gathering of men and women in their common enjoyment of the

taste of the morning, of toothpaste and of not being dead.

"Forty."

It was the new game of "Beaver," popular that summer in England, which

Lewis, an anglomaniac Frenchman, had imported into France. A society

game. Each beard met with, or caught sight of, counted one point: the

same scoring as at lawn tennis, fifteen, thirty, forty and game. The

winner was the man who saw the greatest number of beards first. It was

played at Ascot, in the Temple, at Lords, in omnibuses. The game of

"Beaver" became so intense that at a Royal Garden Party Lewis had

noticed subjects of the King in whom the zest for the game outweighed

the respect due to sovereigns, and who even whilst making their bow

mentally credited themselves with the Royal Beard. Certain champions

with a practised eye scored with incredible rapidity, even amongst

crowds to all appearances clean shaven. Just think then of Sunday round

the bandstands of French provincial towns where beards, perfumed with

verbena or tobacco juice, are still cultivated, and where on some of the

benches entire games can be won at a single stroke!

Robust and full of life, the heirs in a blaze of candle-light, the Board

of Directors and all the lesser employés of the Franco-African Bank

abandoned themselves to their grief. Business men embarrassed by being

brought face to face with nothingness at an hour when typewriters are

usually clicking; bored society people turning their backs to the altar

and scanning the assembly. Everything went off in perfect order. One

felt that at the hour ordained by God certain important fractions of

middle-class wealth and fat dividends had slipped from the strong room

of the deceased to that of the beneficiaries, without any fuss and

without attracting the attention of the Treasury or the envy of

subordinates. A transfer of accounts amid sobs was all that was

necessary. One was reminded that a hundred years before this church of

La Madeleine, in which they were, had so nearly been a bank.

"Beaver and game," said Lewis at the sudden thought that close beside

him in the coffin a thick white curling beard was still sprouting. If,

as happens in some countries, the corpse had lain with its face

uncovered, no one could have denied Lewis a brilliant win. The dead man,

Monsieur Vandémanque, had been one of those ornamental and costly old

idols secured to the pediments of our financial concerns, whose number

increases uselessly with the increase of capital and who are exhibited

once a year before the eyes of the shareholders, whom the sight of so

much age reassures instead of alarming them--heaven only knows why. One

of those men who collect soup tureens of the East India Company, know

the Æneid by heart, have never seen a bill of exchange, are possessed

of savage vanity and greed whilst all the time morbidly grabbing their

directors' fees, and appear outwardly to us as greedy children either

snivelling or sucking at the shrivelled udder of their dividends in

their sleep.

A picture of a majestically-robed Christ in a side window took Lewis

back to his first board meeting--nearly three years before--when he had

braved Monsieur Vandémanque seated in all his glory as Chairman of the

Board, at the top of a green table, on a raised armchair. Above the

twenty-five hairless pates (Lewis alone had black hair) allegories

chased one another across the gilded panels. On the lower floors of the

bank, through the thick pile carpet, the funnel-like pigeon-holes could

be heard sucking slender Gallic savings into the cellars. In the old

counting-house in the basement the nation's sustenance was being

prepared: thrift and the love of securities seasoned with the lure of

impossible dividends.

It was the culminating point of a six months' struggle, carried on by

the retiring members of the board, to prevent the young Lewis from

having a seat on the board when the time came for their re-election.

Monsieur Vandémanque loathed this bold iconoclast with his

ill-breeding, vanity and the haphazard methods of a financial dabbler.

After the reading of the directors' report, Lewis got up very sedately,

and mercilessly criticized the previous year's management, particularly

with regard to current accounts and the use made of the reserve, and,

after casually breaking it to them that he held about three times as

many shares as they imagined, announced his intention of entering a

protest denouncing the resolutions submitted to the two last meetings as

being irregular.

Lewis sat down in the midst of a horrified audience, composed of

intelligent, respectable men, who, the associates of other respectable

people, always shrank from anything crude or obvious, beneath the limp

banner of the words "the correct thing."

They muttered amongst themselves:--"These young fellows must be made to

fall into line."

"If that isn't enough for you, the next time I shall not come

unsupported," said Lewis out loud.

"Who will you have with you?"

He smiled.

"... Proof."

"The Franco-African is and will always be a house of crystal."

"Then it will break."

He was sure of controlling the majority of shares before another year

passed; and he did.

"What exactly do you intend to do?" Monsieur Vandémanque, eager for

compromise, had asked, on the day when Lewis had forced himself in as

general manager, nominated by the shareholders.

"Play an open game, that's all," he answered. "Pass the ball to the

three-quarter line when I get it, and win the game as quickly as

possible."

The old man looked at him uncomprehendingly, but his face was purple.

"You are going to reduce me ..."

"To obedience or penury," answered Lewis, with his usual brutality. A

year before he would not have dared talk like that.

The shock killed Monsieur Vandémanque. Six months later his

high-priest's hands ceased to tremble and the veins on his forehead to

bulge, and now he was lying there beneath the first chrysanthemums of

the year.

Lewis, having successfully broken through that crust which our

traditions and our morals pile up on youth, and having renounced the

immortal principle of the commerce and the spirit of France,

namely:--_always be suspicious of what you are creating_, had, among the

first of his generation, struggled out into the open air. It enabled him

to experience the obloquy that is always hurled at any form of youthful

success. Exhausted France, divided between the struggle for existence

and the struggle to keep up her reputation as a jealous nation, accepted

his innovations with reluctance.

In one year Lewis trebled his business interests and succeeded in

getting hold of the controlling number of shares. Where before

everything was done clandestinely (Lewis could almost hear Monsieur

Vandémanque's: "good wine needs no bush"), all business was now

conducted in the full glare of publicity; whereas before only one

telephone line connected the Rue Scribe with the Bourse, now there were

eighteen lines devoted solely to foreign exchange dealing. Lewis was now

managing the Franco-African Bank and its affiliated companies

practically without control, the Ætas Assurance Company, which was

expanding enormously since its new re-insurance contract with Lloyds,

and the Fidius Research Corporation (chemical products, commercial

rubber, phosphates, oxygen).

II

EVERYONE had to toil up to the Père Lachaise cemetery to be present at

the funeral orations. The only part of the journey that Lewis really

liked was round the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, at the sight of the negro

with his gold clock in his stomach over the _Nègre_ clock factory, of

the flights of flaking steps which rose and fell like switchback

railways, and in their reflections beneath the curves of the asphalt

reminding him of the sloping of old market gardens; of the huge Empire

houses built with the stones of the Bastille, and spattered here and

there by rifle s during days when history was being made.

The hearse, behind its team of horses and the coachman in soot-black,

was sheathed in a dull sombreness in which only the mouths of the horses

showed as damp, pink slits. Lewis watched the setting of the swollen sun

tinging the spokes of the wheels, the buckled shoes of the master of

ceremonies, the transparent orchids and the autumn foliage which left

the scent of damp forests behind it. Suddenly Lewis felt himself seized

by the arm. He freed himself with his elbow. But whoever it was returned

to the attack. So he gripped the insinuated hand and kept it a prisoner

in his own.

The man whom Lewis captured was a little red-headed man with

scallop-shaped whiskers spread over his cheeks. A Neapolitan of the

undone-trouser kind and Paris correspondent of several papers in

Southern Italy, he was an exceedingly clever go-between who had lived in

Paris for several years without either making a fortune or going to

prison. His name was Pastafina.

Lewis knew him of old.

"Why! Its Pastafina."

"Just now walking behind you hat in hand," said Pastafina, "I studied

the shape of your head. In spite of everything you have the skull of an

intelligent man; so I am going to talk seriously to you."

Signor Pastifina expressed himself with as many gestures as an Italian

station master trying to make a train start (at least at the time when

Italian trains never did start). Not daring to smoke openly in the

procession he hid his cigarette in the palm of his hand, like sentries

on duty do.

According as the quarters through which the hearse passed became poorer,

the flowers covering it created more and more sensation.

"He's got a fine escort," said the costermongers, nodding at the dead

man, "but he's got to go all the same."

"Listen. It's just the undertaking for a gambler, a lucky gambler. For

you. I was born in Naples, but my parents were Sicilian, and I've always

kept in touch with Sicily. You didn't know that? Well, what you are not

unaware of is that as a result of the Visocchi Law, which applies both

to the mainland and to Sicily, all large estates not under cultivation

were expropriated in 1920 for the benefit of the peasants. Now I have a

brother, Arsenio Pastafina, who, after prospecting in Mexico and

returning ruined to his own country, became general secretary of our

agricultural syndicate at San Lucido. Now follow me closely; in this

Sicilian commune there was an estate of about five thousand acres

belonging to the ducal family of Montecervato (a branch of the Palmi

family) which was about to escheat to the State. Rather than this the

owner preferred to sell it at a low price, and my brother bought it from

him secretly. The property is four hours' mule ride from Caltabellotta,

on the south coast; you follow a track bordered by fig-trees and those

laurel trees that recall the arms of the first Siculi. Not one of your

healthy-looking French roads, but one of those upward sloping southern

roads covered with open sores like the back of an old donkey ..."

(What with the Château d'Eau Barracks, and the pale sun caught in the

network of overhead tram wires, the Place de la République was a

horrible sight. Is there anything quite so out of place as this in

Paris?)

" ... sloping upwards, I say, beneath the sky transparent with heat and

fringed with yellowish green on the horizon. You might almost think that

there was already sulphur in the air. In the distance smoke rises from

some sacrifice, one knows not what ...

"Allow me to precede you along the road to show you the way.

"I will pass over the various specimens of antiquity, a Saracen castle,

a Norman basilica, itself built between the limbs of a Temple of Juno.

We have arrived. Behold us in a desert at the foot of stony moraines

coming down from the mountains. In the distance a glittering sword blade

rests on this desert: the sea. Cast your eyes down. Hardly had my

brother taken possession of the property this summer, than for want of

something better to do he reopened some Punic works six weeks ago, which

were abandoned twenty-two centuries before. And what do you think

happened? He discovered what are possibly the richest sulphur and rock

salt deposits in the whole of Sicily. So far everything has been kept

very quiet. My brother has only prospected the ground and taken a few

preliminary precautions. Naturally he cannot develop the place himself.

He quite realizes that to go into partnership spells failure, as would

also leasing it; to say nothing of capital being tied up, even if he

could find any. So he wants to sell outright."

Behind the hearse and the smell of the lilac wreaths surrounding the

procession with a false sense of springtime, Pastafina drew a resinous

looking object from the pocket of his pitch-black Raglan overcoat.

"The sample is amazingly rich; it will catch fire a yard away, and burns

with a beautiful blue flame. What a find, caro mio! I have got an eight

days' option. I was just off to London when I saw you."

Lewis whistled softly to himself for a minute or two, wondering whether

he could find out whether any subsidiary ores were present. Then he said

abruptly:

"Any trace of mercury?"

"I don't think so."

"Any barytes."

"Yes."

"What do you want for your option?"

"A thousand pounds sterling."

"When do you want to know by?"

"Now, at once. Otherwise I start at three o'clock for London by

aeroplane."

Pastafina plucked out his words one by one as though they were the

strings of a guitar.

Lewis took his fountain pen from his pocket and, still walking along,

signed a cheque on his silk hat.

"And now," he said, "let's break the ranks as one used to at school, and

go and have a vermouth without anyone seeing us."

III

"IT's scarcely credible," said Lewis to himself, as though the words he

had uttered a few hours earlier behind the hearse were still ringing in

his ears. Neither reflection nor folly had anything to do with his

determination. It was just that he had been struck whilst Pastafina was

speaking, by the wholly southern character of the approach to La

Roquette. Pretty work girls wearing pearls, suits for hire,

turtle-doves, songs going up in spirals, corsets. When the road narrowed

into a sort of corridor the hearse traced its way with difficulty

through a Neapolitan riot of food and life which seemed to overflow on

to the passing dead: the dinner dishes, sweet wines, snails, choice

tripe. He learnt later that in the adjacent passages lived Bergamask

table-leg turners and the Parmesan chauffeurs of the Say refineries, who

help to give this quarter its Italian air.

Was it not in this way, by association of ideas, that his most

successful speculations had been carried through? He often said, "When in

doubt never bring common sense into play."

What he did not say was that the arrangement of letters in a document,

the hour at which a telegram arrived, the hidden meaning of colours, the

symbolism of numbers constantly intervened in his decisions and

influenced him in the moments preceding the signature of a contract.

"Things have not changed," he used to say, "since the time when the

smell of a chicken's entrails decided the fate of an empire."

Hardly three hours had passed since Lewis in full mourning had, with an

indifferent clod of earth, blessed the trench where Monsieur

Vandémanque, like a Kanaka chief, with his weapons and his helmet of

shells had gone down in answer to the calling of his number, in dress

clothes, patent-leather boots and with the insignia of a Commander of

the Legion of Honour round his neck, to be guarded henceforth by

graphite allegorical figures.

On leaving the cemetery Lewis threaded his way through the huge

necropolis like a goods yard in which marble trucks had been

side-tracked for ever. Arriving at the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, he

leapt into a taxi, drove home, got in through the ground-floor window

(the neighbours were quite used to this), threw on the ground his black

gloves and his mourning clothes, which lay like an overturned inkstand

on the carpet, put on an old golf jersey and a yellow hat which had once

been grey, whistled up his dog and fled into the forest of

Fontainebleau. He bought for his lunch an enormous lark pasty which

would have satisfied the hunger of an entire family, and he ate this

with one hand as he steered with the other. At school or in the army, no

amount of punishment had ever prevented him from breaking out on the

last, and, above all, during the earliest fine days when the spring is

still hidden but is there all the same. This mania for playing truant

still took possession of him. He would stay for hours seated in the

fields on the borders of a forest, breathing in the scent of the soil

near the great fallen birch trees, each numbered and arranged in stacks,

and which still bore initials carved on their pink flesh like the

mirrors in private rooms in restaurants. Lewis only got up in order to

follow the already too horizontal sun, or to fire revolver shots at the

crows.

Seated amongst the irregular blocks of sandstone which add to that

confusion of stones and trees making up the forest of Fontainebleau, in

the midst of ferns withered by the frost, dried acorns and rabbit trade,

Lewis pictured himself on a white road in Sicily driving his long shadow

before him towards a field where amongst the thistles the soil gleamed

with a thousand diamond points, "the eyes of salt," as Pastafina had

said just before, of salt, brother of sulphur.

The evening grew cooler and Lewis got up with a feeling of strength. He

would go to Sicily. He would float a limited company with shares quoted

in New York and Buenos Aires to drain away the savings of Italian

emigrants.... And, on reflection, why should he not provide the

preliminary capital himself without appealing to the Franco-African

Bank? In this way he would have a venture entirely of his own. His pride

had been clamouring for that for a long time. In short, he would be

buying himself an adventure. At that moment he had a sudden feeling that

it was going to have a great effect on his life.

His ears, still burdened with the din of traffic, became tired of the

absence of sound. He switched on his head lamps and went back to that

red glow, that lighter pit picked out with pink which gradually came to

life in the night as the cobblestones became rougher: Paris.

IV

LEWIS let himself glide along the Champs Elysées up to where the new

streets start. In the newest and most macadamized of all Madame Magnac

had her house. He entered the hall, making the black and white flags

ring beneath his hobnailed boots, looked at himself in the be-mirrored

walls (fine brown eyes, hard and sharp, a strong jaw, shocks of ruffled

black hair and a half-open hunting waistcoat), took his dog under his

arm and went upstairs.

Elsie Magnac was one of those people who, not content with impressing a

seal of garish originality on their surroundings--both friends and

furniture--let the superfluity thereof overflow on to the staircases of

their houses. On the very first landing a rainbow-coloured vase insisted

on acquainting the visitor with the rigid splendour of Aztec art; a

gondola lantern ornamented with acorns from a cardinal's hat, adorned

the second story.

Everything in Madame Magnac's house was uncompromisingly perfect. Her

unpretending name, the mystery with which she surrounded herself, the

letters of reproof which she wrote to those papers who, forgetful of her

instructions, had printed the names of her guests amongst their society

news, all the roaring mechanism of a queen's incognito, enabled her to

pass very far from unnoticed.

Following an unhappy marriage, Madame Magnac had sacrificed herself on

the altars of friendship, offering herself without reserve on their cold

marble. People collected at her house every evening at six o'clock (she

made a point of being at home) for a minute criticism of the

contemporary situation and an analysis of the contradictions of the

human heart. She always received the same friends, with the air of owing

her life to each of them, which they all appreciated extremely,

particularly the old ones. She only gave up seeing them when they made

"foolish marriages," that is to say, married girls whom she considered

too young.

There were several lamps on the ground like Davy lamps waiting for their

owners, and the uncertain light from these shone up the walls purposely

denuded of all decoration.

Her drawing-room had nothing of the obvious and geometric flashiness of

a shop, but resembled rather the austere anonymity of the palaces of the

great antique dealers through which a noble being with exquisite Levite

hands leads one to a shrine hung with grey moiré silk, in which lies,

the victim of an overwhelmingly perfect choice, a fourth century effigy

of Buddha.

Lewis entered heavily and sat on the floor without any greeting,

stretching his big steaming boots to the fire, with his dog, which

diffused a loathsome smell, between his knees. With an excess of

affectation he liked being untidy in elegant surroundings because it was

not displeasing to him to give an impression of strength and bad

breeding. Thus it was that he readily dined in a lounge suit in the

midst of ladies in evening dress; and he was always asking for out of

the way things that disorganized the service at meals.

Not far from him, unconsciously seated above the radiator from which the

warm air rose, blowing out the legs of his trousers, was the Prince de

Waldeck. The Prince de Waldeck was what Pierre de Coulevain would

describe as "Old France"; his face was wrinkled like the sole of a foot,

and he wore a Lavallière tie, button boots and a coat of a "Club

Agricole" cut; he never shook hands with anyone, and beneath a

blustering demeanour concealed a heart of gold. With a certain bitter

charm he could talk amusingly about anything because of his warped sense

of humour. He was one of the last of the idlers, and belonged to a past

generation: in the morning he fenced, in the afternoon he hunted about

for seventeenth-century first editions and fortune tellers; he was the

only man who still went to tea parties; in the evening he always

dressed, even when dining by himself. One of his affectations was never

to tell his age. When anyone asked him he answered "--ty-eight,"

smothering the first part of the number. He was known as Tyate. Not a

day passed without his making a pun. He used to act as judge in the

jumping at the Horse Show. He occasionally went to theatres but never to

music halls or cinemas. In fact he represented a complete period.

At the moment of Lewis's entry the Prince had just told how Madame

Briffault, whom he had consulted that afternoon, had foretold that the

greater part of his fortune "which he had hidden away in England" (as

indeed he had) would soon be lost.

"It's the fault of the financial 'International,' isn't it?" he asked,

turning to an ex-Prime Minister for the time being unemployed, who

blushed; he took any remark directly addressed to himself as a

challenge, and kept himself modestly in a corner like a spittoon.

"You see, Anglophile," he went on, addressing Lewis, "your beastly

pound sterling...," to the great annoyance of Captain Montgiscard,

himself an obsolete type of naval officer and art connoisseur, who was

waiting to be asked to play Delage's _Hindu Love Songs_ on the piano,

and who was running his bejewelled fingers through a tactile beard which

was like that of a deep-sea fish.

"My dear old Tyate," answered Lewis, "that is of no interest at all.

What _is_ amusing is to do business. Whether it is in shells or English

bank-notes, or depreciated stock, it is all the same. One is put into

this world to gamble."

It pleased Lewis to see his companion's face fall, though he was really

very fond of him. He smiled, for he knew the secret mania of the Prince,

which was to dabble in speculation. The more absurd it was the more it

attracted him; Lewis did the same thing, but whereas he was invariably

successful, Waldeck was ruining himself. He was always trying to borrow

a million francs till next morning. "Personally," answered Lewis, "I

always find it easier to make any money I want by myself without

employing sleeping partners." Not that Lewis liked either to tease or to

deceive people; but between himself and his friends, in spite of their

being schoolfellows (he was educated at les Roches and at Winchester),

and of their having shared the same youthful pleasures, there always

remained the error of his birth. French on his mother's side, Lewis was

the natural son of a Belgian banker who died before he left college,

leaving him not only very little money but very expensive tastes without

anything to satisfy their requirements but a little Jewish blood; or so

it was said. He did not remember his mother. Being brought up by

servants, he received lessons in self-reliance, cunning and scepticism,

which enabled him to understand his position, to suffer from it and to

be revenged for it very early in life. He never forgave his companions

of his own age for the gulf that separated them. In 1920, the year when

amidst many rude awakenings a curious romantic movement in business

triumphed, he was precisely what a century before Balzac called "a

Banker's Bastard." Waldeck, Montgiscard, Marbot, and Léonardino, were

nevertheless sincerely attached to Lewis. They admired him and

considered him to have no equal in most fields. Certain people had, out

of jealousy, tried to tread in his footsteps; it cost them dear; it was

like sheep following a goat on to the ice and falling through owing to

their greater weight. Lewis saw a great deal of his friends, or rather,

to be accurate, was much sought by them. Did he like them? He would have

felt their loss keenly but he could not resist tyrannising over them. It

was not that they had ever shown contempt for him, but Lewis wanted to

be revenged on the initial injustice of Fate. He was their superior in

vitality, intelligence and sexual power, qualities which fife had

compelled him to develop at a time when others, either handsomer or

richer than he, let these most precious gifts run to seed. He would have

put himself out to any extent or faced any danger to render them a

service, but, at the same time he liked to feel them at his mercy. He

beat them at games and took away their mistresses--had been doing so for

at least twelve years--without feeling that honour was quite satisfied

by any of these petty revenges.

"Waldeck and you, Lewis, that's enough!" "You're fined drinks all

round," cried Madame Magnac, to show that it was a bachelor party.

At her instigation the subject changed, for it had been settled once for

all, on principle, that no discussion on money matters should ever take

place in her house. She wanted to maintain her Court of Love in an

atmosphere of malice, scepticism and pleasure. ("What is so nice about

going to Elsie's," a foolish old man once said, "is that one is in a

kind of anthology, of oral chronicle of events.")

"Is it true that since the war people are losing the art of making

love?" asked someone.

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

Madame Magnac.

Many people wondered what could attract her to Lewis and Lewis to her,

on seeing her so delicately moulded, so well suited to the society

husband from whom she was separated, so exactly like her photographs by

Rehbinder, so faithful to the Constitution and to well-constituted

people, as Marbot would say, besides being a Chevalière of the Legion

of Honour, and all the rest of it. The reason was that in the first

place they had been lovers for a long time (which is not really a good

reason at the beginning, but subsequently becomes the best possible

one); and secondly, that Lewis was good looking. She was not as finely

made as he, but she had more refinement. She had great personal

magnetism and was passionately fond of pleasure and clothes; she also

possessed an excellent cellar, which meant a great deal to Lewis ("He

clings to her," said his friends, "like a drunken man to his

lamp-post"); in their intimate moments he found her full of

inventiveness and fun. They shared an inclination towards greediness,

extravagance and pretty women.

The conversation went on.

"Love," observed the Prince de Waldeck, "is no longer the highly

technical trade it used to be."

"It's like everything else, there's no time for it."

"People have forgotten how."

"Personally," put in Elsie Magnac, "I don't believe that any men are

indifferent. It is women who are clumsy."

V

LEWIS shrugged his shoulders to show that he considered the conversation

dull.

"Do you mind if I telephone to Martial?" he said abruptly. He made a

point of not being a good talker, thinking that not to shine gave him

greater authority.

"Of course: you know your way."

Lewis rang up his office. Martial answered. Lewis announced that he

would not be dining with him that evening and that he would leave him to

dine alone like an elder with two Susannas. Were they not both

flaxen-fair and delightful things to feed?

"What did Fidius close at? What was the street price?"

A lady had telephoned several times from the Hôtel Meurice during the

last hour. Lewis remembered that he had an appointment to meet an

unknown lady there.

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

me," he told Martial.

He had neither the manners nor the polished speech of the middle-class

young man, but behaved like a scion of the aristocracy.

Lucky Martial! Little did he dream of this life when Lewis made his

acquaintance on the Eastern front on a lovely shell-strewn spring

morning in 1915 (another of his geographic adventures). A doctor of

philosophy and an ex-cowboy, Martial, at the age of forty-two, had

volunteered for active service in the same regiment as Lewis, and at the

age of forty-six he had volunteered for service with Lewis himself. He

was devoted to him, not because Lewis deserved it at all, but because he

had taught him how to live. This fellowship of the trenches carried on

into civilian life, such an attachment of a simple soul for a more

complex being, had been unheard of since the First Empire. Martial slept

at the office, kept the accounts and had not had an hour's holiday in

four years. (It was hardly a holiday to have to console all the fair

ladies abandoned by Lewis.) He clung to Lewis like a screen photographer

to his star. He was quite happy. Lewis paid him a large salary, which he

won back from him at poker every month.

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

tell you all about it."

Having said this, Lewis went home.

VI

LEWIS went home. He wanted to be alone. His dinner consisted of a cup of

coffee. He went to bed and his head threw a big shadow on the ceiling.

Opening a drawer he took out a red notebook, in which he kept a register

of all the women he had loved....

On and on they go, yielding, passionate, credulous, sad, too well fed or

half starved. Highly strung and easily bored, Lewis jumped from

adventure to adventure with the rapidity of a cinematograph, until he

could hardly distinguish between the minor characters and the stars. And

yet he would have been shocked at being called fickle. Women: he wanted

them all the time, why, he didn't know. He wanted them to study their

profiles, to load them with presents, to make them drunk, to cultivate

their intelligence, to debauch them, to mould their characters, to get

rid of them, to work off his irritation on them, to stay in bed for days

instructing them in foreign literature, to avoid eating alone, to wake

him up, to get him out of scrapes, to try to get at the truth about

them, to travel with them. Particularly to travel with them. It is then

that they are most attractive and in their best temper. For do not

journeys begin with clothes and end with more clothes? And there is the

feeling of infidelity to so many towns, so many people, so many

countries. There are as many different pleasures as there are different

sheets on the various beds.

Would he go to Sicily alone? It was essentially a journey to be made

with a woman. Something rather capricious, a lovely little animal--"Has

been in several famous collections," as they say in the auction

catalogues. Exquisite hands and feet, and who would talk about herself

all the time, would lose the keys of her luggage, write her name in the

moisture on the windows and expect one to get out at each station to buy

her "souvenirs" of the country.

No, he would go alone.

Lewis very seldom slept, just a few hours, perhaps, towards the dawn.

The house was quite quiet. Outside it was raining. Three o'clock struck.

Time to start work. He took from beneath his pillow "_A Treatise on the

Possession of the Subsoil in European Countries: Italy.... Code

Napoléon, Recconi law, March 18th_, 1873."

He made marginal notes and then, putting on his glasses, drafted a

scheme for the development of the deposits of San Lucido.

VII

THE P.L.M. railway bore Lewis rapidly and powerfully away from the life

of Paris. After leaving the campanile of the Gare de Lyon behind during

dinner, they followed the graceful river outlines of the Seine to

Charenton (with its shallops). Then the intoxicating descent through the

Burgundian vineyards; after which night lasted as far as Italy.

Lewis only knew Europe from having travelled through it on business,

often imperfectly, always hurriedly, without ever opening either his

eyes or his heart to it. He knew all about the time tables and

itineraries, even though he liked throwing regular routes and through

tickets to the winds. He sacrificed depth to length, and, like all his

contemporaries, he was--he and his nerves--the victim of the spirit of

speed. His business sense was really nothing but a taste for adventure.

He worked as he would have played, heedless of rules, selfishly, without

giving a thought to the needs of the nation or of the period.

"I don't care a damn," he wrote to Martial, "for the inner meaning of

things."

Lewis liked leaving France if he did not like leaving Paris; "this

cosmo_im_politan," as Monsieur Vandémanque dubbed him, maintained that

he felt far more bewildered beyond the fortifications of Paris than

beyond the frontiers of France.

To leave one's country is the next best thing to coming back to it.

After passing Modane he had felt the strange atmosphere that one

breathes at the gates of France, just as though France were not the most

entrancing place to remain in (or perhaps because of it), experiencing

that pleasure one has when one's relations with someone or something are

strained, but all the more precious for that, and which are so well

described by the expression "out of tune." Other countries are only

parts of a continent or of the world; France is a sealed vessel, a form

of diet complete in itself, interesting to, but not interested by

Europe. One can feel German villages tremble at the least sign of

movement from a Russian army corps, and the whole of Spain heave at a

shot fired at one of her governors in the garrisons of Morocco. London,

with even more reason, throbs with a kind of terrestrial neuralgia on

hearing of oil being struck in Mexico, or of a political murder in the

Punjab. But Paris, self-centred Paris, always remains unmoved.

International upheavals reach the Paris press agencies with an air of

unreality; from there they find their way into the editorial offices and

to the caricaturists, and thence to a laughing public which sings songs

about them. The more intelligent people never open a paper. So that on

leaving France one has more than at other times the impression of

escaping at the right moment and taking a holiday from one's domestic

happiness, and of avoiding the danger of living with a wife who is

completely satisfying.

Europe itself only begins beyond the frontier. The gates, even on the

French side, seem to assume a peculiar character, and in spite of the

presence of the customs officials, to have something foreign about them.

For an instant the dotted frontier line seems to rise like a drawbridge,

and Mentone-Garavan appears in its blue setting with its customs

officials smoking at the latticed window of their palm-leaf hut; check

trousers are drying on the bougainvilliers, and a commemorative tablet

shows that at this point France dates from 1861. A bubbling brook

scurries through a gap in the rock pierced by those caves in which

primeval man sleeps amongst flints and fossil teeth. At Modane, through

which Lewis passed forty-eight hours earlier, the frontier consists of a

cold corridor of wet stones suspended over a bronze-coloured torrent

with ferns that brush the windows of the passing carriages. Two

languages with but a single rail. Frasne-Vallorbe, where begins the land

of icy water, black pine trees and cheerless plains, which runs like a

sash across the whole of Europe. At Kehl, that bridge which is such a

feat of German toil, like an Eiffel Tower flung hurriedly across the

Rhine. Jeumont, Feignies, the outlets into Belgium, where during the

night the customs' searchlights play amongst the slag heaps lining the

pitiless canals like limelight following an actress off the stage. To

say nothing of the openings into Spain: Portbou and its Vauban forts,

like huge neglected roses, given over to traffic in barrels of sweets

medicinal wines; Béhobie with the sound of Spanish klaxons ascending

along the Pyrenean torrents. Hendaye and the international bridge where

the Guardia Civil hands over extradited people to the French police.

Lewis might have left France and won his freedom in almost any direction

with his eyes shut.

VIII

"_Ma présentation, en cette tenue de maraudeur

aquatique, je la peux tenter, avec l'excuse

du hasard._"

(S. MALLARMÉ, _Le Nénuphar blanc_.)

THE hotel, if one could dignify by this term the old convent where

cockroaches followed one another across the tiled floors like a

stencilled pattern, was full of the tragedies of such places in the

South; sheets too short (the top one being sewn to the blanket), granite

bolsters (from which one wakes with pulverised ears), a permanent odour

of disinfectant, candlelit nights on which the tall shadows of the

bug-hunters dance across the rough plaster walls, holes in the mosquito

curtains through which the mosquitoes crawl, and, pervading everything,

the sickly smell of night-light oil.

The town and the port bear different names here; the reason for this is

obscure, since the sea is at the end of the street. But if you want to

get down to the beach as Lewis did every morning since his arrival in

Sicily, you found that it was a forty minutes' walk, first along a road

hidden beneath a thick floury dust patterned with chickens' feet, and

then through sunken paths, climbing down the same kind of terraces that

stretch from Gibraltar to the Atlas, and from Toulon to Lebanon, and

make the shores of the Mediterranean look like the tiers of a giant

circus. On getting down to the sea you saw that previously in the

village you had been on a level with the horizon, and that the hotel

itself was nothing but a cube which, set in a block of sky, was so hard

that light seemed to break on it, only succeeding in reaching its more

salient and unshaded surfaces.

Stretched out naked with the _Mattino_ folded into a cocked hat on his

head and his loins girt with a bath towel, Lewis waited for his skin to

turn the colour of pyrites. Afterwards there would be a walk under the

early afternoon sun to regain the shelter of his room. Thirty yards from

the shore the coolness would evaporate, but until then he had to admit

it to be the best bathe of the year. The gentle shelving of the shore

went on beneath the water; the sand was so hot--even though it was

towards the end of autumn--that after eleven o'clock he had to decide on

his place and not move from it, at the risk of being scorched. After

all, was not Africa just across there, a few hours' journey by sea?

Grassless gardens came down towards the beach where olive trees, which

were nothing but skin and bone, stretched themselves out of the cracked

soil the colour of bread-crust.

That same morning Lewis had received a visit from the brothers Pastafina

as he was getting up. The journalist brother had discarded that

ferocious pseudo-American elegance of which the Italians were the first

pioneers in Europe, especially for film purposes, and had again become

the Cavaliere Pastafina, with the peg-top trousers of Italian

comedy--the fashion for which begins at the latitude of

Naples--celluloid cuffs and an open collar showing a hairy chest. He was

followed by his brother, the Commendatore Pastafina, a kind of political

Maciste with a bibulous eye, sweeping gestures, black cheeks, nails and

armband, oiled hair ending in quiffs, and dressed in that uniform of

white cloth buttoned up the side which leads so many Sicilians to be

mistaken for half-pay naval officers. The option on the deposits expired

that same evening at eight o'clock. Lewis had full power to deal with

the matter since he had acted without consulting anyone, being certain

of not being called upon to supply all the authorized capital, since the

business was bound to prosper from the start. The day before, with the

help of experts, he had again confirmed the excellence of the way in

which everything combined to make the working satisfactory: operations

could be carried out in nearly every case under the open sky, except to

the west, in the ancient workings which could be lined with gently

sloping galleries; timber and pit props were cheap; there was plenty of

labour to be had, except perhaps at harvest time; and a possible output

of five hundred tons a day with a profit of sixty lire for each ton

extracted. Three borings had been made, all very satisfactory. In the

evening Lewis had cut out pieces of blue paper to represent the

projected factory, the warehouse and the laboratories, with the

enthusiasm of a young couple distributing furniture over a plan of their

new home.

Nevertheless he pleaded for a postponement in order to study the matter

more closely, particularly from the point of view of the possibility of

getting a concession from the municipality of a mixed railway to the

seashore, which would carry passengers and thus help to reduce the

initial expenses.

The brothers Pastafina, without even looking at each other, spoke

together and answered that they were not in a position to grant any

delay. A chromolithograph portrait of King Humbert fastened to the wall

by a nail, a drawing pin and a wafer, upheld their protestations. Any

renewal of option was impossible. The signing was arranged, therefore,

for five o'clock that same evening, after the siesta.

Lewis had already been in the water twice. The salt stung his shoulders

and his skin began to glisten. Through his closed eyelids the light

shone pink, with stabs of darkness and dazzling little radiations, as he

listened to the droning song that always seems to accompany sun baths.

He thought of the blind men who say: "I can hear the sun." He opened his

eyes. The fight seemed to fall vertically as it does in a studio with a

top light. Too bright to be the moon, but just as sombre, the

chlorine-coloured sun seemed to have been plucked of its rays. The sea,

sleek and calm as some oleaginous by-product, had that glaucous tinge of

the North Sea at Ostend; for a moment he was bewildered by all this,

quite forgetting that he was wearing green spectacles. He took them off

and, like a fist between the eyes, he received the full glare of the

southern sun in which all shadows are absorbed. The _Mattino_ on his

head began to smell scorched. He went into the water again.

After swimming about fifty strokes from the shore, Lewis saw before him,

at about the same distance again, a boat propelled by a sailor with a

stern oar. In the bows a woman was lying face downwards fishing; bending

forward, with a shadow in her bosom, she was letting down her line. She

was dressed in a black knitted costume out of which issued arms and legs

shaded with lean muscles, spare and very sunburnt. On her head she wore

a red india-rubber bathing cap. Lewis admired her. She had that lovely

burnt earth colour of Mediterranean skins, whereas he was still only a

sallow-skinned barbarian. He swam towards the boat. She must surely be a

foreigner to bathe so late in the season; the Italians never think of

entering the water after August. Presently he discovered that she was

not fishing--she was sounding and taking notes, and seemed to be

surveying the bed of the sea.

"I wonder if she is making a chart," Lewis asked himself, turning over

on his back and unconstrainedly blowing like a whale. He was still

swimming. As he drew near the young woman pushed a stray lock of hair

beneath her cap without, however, lifting her eyes to him. Lewis swam a

few more strokes, and catching hold of the boat, asked:--

"Do you mind?"

Above, the blueness of the sky was intense. The water reflected a

shimmering network of light on to the side of the boat. From the high

mountain paths the tinkle of mule bells came to his ears. At the tip of

each wave shone a star far brighter than any that shine at night.

Dolphins were holding aquatic sports in the distance. Jelly fish, like

lost fried eggs, were drifting with the tide. A little cloud hung over

the mountain like a Jesuit canopy over an Archbishop's head. Still

pulling up the lead, she finally leant over towards Lewis and looked at

him; set in a face the colour of iron, were two eyes which in the

extreme brightness had faded into grey, and were so frank, so tender,

and yet so incapable of any weakness that he could almost feel the water

growing colder under her gaze. He made it clear that he was not rested

yet by panting for breath.

"Are you tired?" she asked simply, in Italian, in a voice the perfection

of which struck him like a fist.

"No, madame. But I am out of breath. Out of training. Too many cigars."

When Lewis lifted his eyes she was gone. He just heard a splash from the

other side of the boat and was covered with spray. Turning, he saw her

swimming towards the shore. He dashed after her; as he got nearer the

sea-bed appeared, along which moved the refracted shadows of their two

bodies. She made more headway than he for she swam with a crawl stroke,

with bent arms, her head beneath the water, showing her right and left

cheeks alternately, her legs stiff and her feet beating the surface of

the water. When she touched bottom she had gained twenty lengths on

Lewis. He saw her take refuge in a yellow bath gown which an urchin held

out to her. She was smiling. Near her was a basket of figs covered with

a damp cloth, and an aluminium sandwich box.

Lewis, not having a towel, rolled himself in the sand and, when

completely clothed in it, lit a cigarette and lay down on the shore of a

deeper brown where the fishermen's nets were spread out to dry.

Quite close by she stretched herself out face downwards, crushing her

shadow on to a bath towel, her legs together, her arms above her head as

though she was going to dive again. Little blue veins ran along her

thighs like tattooed snakes. Her black hair was spread on the sand,

leaving her neck bare.

When she had roasted enough she turned over to give the other side a

turn. In this position she looked like a romantic English poet drowned

and cast up by the storm.

She wiped the salt from her eyes.

Hornets were flying about just off the ground. Lewis waved towards the

sea, beneath violet patches on which sunken rocks were hidden.

"Since you have beaten me, you owe me my revenge."

"You will have that this evening, monsieur," she replied in French.

IX

ROUND an ebony table (which really turned out to be white marble when

the flies were driven off with a duster), behind closed shutters, and

accompanied by the chirping of grasshoppers, the lawyer read the deed of

transfer before the brothers Pastafina, the Syndic and Lewis who signed

it. Six million lire, plus the costs of the sale, plus various

commissions, plus the State tax, plus the registration fees, the

foreigner's residential tax, the tourist fees, plus the municipal taxes,

plus poor rate, odd centimes, so much per cent for war cripples, etc.,

etc. In evidence of an early development, blue prints of contoured

surveys lay on the ground. On the mantelpiece a blow lamp, some samples,

a bottle of maraschino.

After the exchange of signatures the journalist took Lewis by the arm

and went with him as far as the garage. Lewis wanted a car to go over

the land in, but at the garage he was told that a foreign lady had hired

the only car the town boasted. Yes, she left immediately after lunch,

driving herself (an astonishing thing in the south where even the

humblest driver never moves without an "assistant" to start the engine,

so as to economise his own strength).

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

"I'm going your way."

He added lyrically:--

"Behold the beginning of the season; it is snowing in Paris, dear boy.

Foreigners are already beginning to arrive here, asking themselves

whether it is better to be bored in the country or ill in town. Once

more the barbarian hordes swarm down towards the cities of the sun, of

art and of fashionable complaints. Sicily, mind you, really is a land of

demi-gods and giants, in spite of old English women and their lace

schools."

"Pastifina is right," thought Lewis, as he went down those crowded

alleys with their soup-like atmosphere where cabins distempered with the

Reckitt blue colour which one finds all over the East, sprang up amongst

the eucalyptus trees. And tomato sauce spread out everywhere like a

national banner! He stopped at the filthiest blind alleys where heaps of

refuse consisting of squeezed-out lemons, dead rats, chicken feathers,

old boots, grey hair and fish bones were fermenting together. Pigs slept

beneath people's beds. Little herd boys, who were much too good looking,

drove goats tied by the leg before them with long bamboos used for

cleaning out drains, cursing in their Sicilian dialect full of Spanish

words. A gentle breeze before the prison stirred the feathers of the

Bersagliere sentries.

Lewis would have liked to fondle the children and the cats; but they all

fled from him. He began to reproach himself for lacking sufficient

simplicity. Was he never going to arrive at a quiet, easy life? What was

to prevent him from settling down here as the proprietor of a villa

amongst gigantic oil jars and the shafts of broken columns? To seek what

adventure the locality had to offer instead of going away to-morrow as

he intended, without having methodically pursued the opportunities which

come to every man who takes the time to develop them?

That morning's adventure, for instance. He went over the last few days,

a thing he never did as a rule; he asked himself, for the first time in

his life, "Have I made a fool of myself, or was I right to sign?" For

the first time in his life, too, something in him seemed to call for

reflection.

As though guessing his thoughts the Italian stopped him.

"I am all the more pleased that it is settled," he said, "because if you

had not put your name to the papers there were other people after the

deal; a new option had been granted by us to begin at eight this

evening, the hour at which yours expired. And I can assure you that the

deal would have been concluded in a moment."

"May I ask by whom?" asked Lewis.

Pastafina hesitated a moment.

" ... By the Apostolatos Bank of Trieste."

X

WHILST waiting for dinner Lewis walked up and down the deserted terrace.

A tinge of blue lay over everything. He looked at the sea a thousand

feet below him, casting little short waves on to the beach so lazily

that each one seemed as if it were going to be the last, after which one

expected it to become once for all a large silent lake. A lizard made

the dry leaves rustle; the walls, warmed all day by the sun, were

growing cold as the evening drew on and creaked like a cooling stove.

Along the thread-like paths rising to where he stood, Lewis saw old

women returning from the spring carrying their water jars on their

heads. The coastline quivered like a rustic script and, underlined by

lights, strove to maintain a straight line cut only here and there by

harbours.

Would he ever see her again?

Lewis escaped from none of those monotonous but charming problems which

arise between two people placed in direct contact by fate. He was first

conscious of that local anæsthesia which extends itself to every

thought but the one that is absorbing us, on discovering that he could

not get up any interest in the purchase of the mine. Whatever subject he

touched on, he lost himself in reverie. He was thinking of this stranger

woman. She had doubtless hired the car for lack of something to do. What

was she doing all alone in this country? Where did she spend her

evenings? He had already forgotten her features. Her image seemed to

fall with the night: he rather doubted whether it would rise again with

the sun next morning. He had lost it for ever. He tried very hard to

recall it. Suddenly he remembered one perfect and illuminating detail

which had never struck him at the time: her hand with its nails quite

violet from their long immersion in cold water. A short hand in which

common sense triumphed over dreaminess; the thumb was large, in itself

rather a rare thing amongst women, and full of common sense; but she had

tapering fingers which were always close together. There was a general

effect of loyalty, fidelity, quickness and clearness of intelligence

which, on reflection, won him completely. A useful hand. A

seventeenth-century hand. He had held so many others, sensuously

modelled, too exquisite to be followed in all their lines, dimpled, full

of whims, hands which grow damp under the influence of music or

pleasure.

To see her again. To touch that hand at last.... To distract himself he

began to compose a song in the German manner:

I met a mermaid swimming in the sea.

And the taste of seaweed lingers in my mouth.

He suddenly realized with a pang of regret that this evening no one was

waiting for him anywhere. He thought of Madame Magnac in Paris. The

pleasant life he led seemed to him from this distance to be full of

privations. He pictured his existence as having been terribly hard

hitherto; a womanless childhood and an orphaned youth; he began to pity

himself. He hoped that happier days were in store for him. He decided to

make more friends; he managed his life extremely well and had always

kept away from big dinner parties, definite office hours, servant

troubles, professional conversationalists, marriage, scenes with

mistresses and all other things that might prey upon his liberty, the

luxury tax of snobbishness, the money troubles of his friends, children,

the disdain of the haughty, the envy of his inferiors, in fact

everything that spoils our daily life. But all this was negative and

unsatisfying.

Night began to fall, accompanied by music coming from no one knew where;

a shutter banged against a wall, rattling like a skeleton; the ancient

clocks beat out one by one the dangerous weapons of the iron hours.

Above the village street the mountain still thrust up its dusky hump,

bearing, without flinching, the weight of the older quarters of the

town, placed so high that the topmost windows touched the lowest stars.

XI

A WAITER came through the blue-distempered glass doors of the restaurant

and familiarly handed Lewis a visiting card between his fingers (the

summer service of the hotel).

_Banque Apostolatos_

_Trieste._

Someone was asking to see him. He was just about to say that he was not

in when he changed his mind.

It was she.

"I come to see you as a neighbour. I am in the annexe."

Lewis greeted her, congratulating himself on the unexpectedness of the

thing. Then he said suddenly in a formal voice:

"What have you got to do with the Apostolatos Bank?"

She replied, composedly, that her name was Apostolatos, Irene

Apostolatos, that the Apostolatoses of Trieste were her first cousins

and that they managed the bank between the three of them. The London

Apostolatoses were her uncles; the New York Apostolatoses (who had

married, one, a Lazarides of Marseilles, and the other a Damaschino of

Alexandria) were her great uncles. In fact, they all belonged to the

same family and came originally from the Greek Islands.

"What is the Apostolatos Bank doing here?" asked Lewis, as though he

were unaware of the patient efforts of the Greek banking group to lay

hands on the mineral products of the Mediterranean. He well knew the

reputation for greed and stability held by this old house, which dated

from the Greek Independence.

"Didn't Pastafina tell you that we held an option on the San Lucido

deposits after the expiry of yours? I was alone at Trieste when they put

it up to us, eight days ago. It interested me deeply; one of my cousins

was at Vichy, the other in Constantinople; I took a fast Lloyd boat

going to Malta and came on here."

"But now that I have signed?"

"I go back to-morrow; so there's no time to be lost. I came to see you,

monsieur, to propose to buy you out. What do you want for the deposits?"

Lewis could not see her properly as she stood there in the light of a

garden lamp round which the butterflies were hovering and casting

flickering shadows on her face. Her dress was of that stiff yellow

muslin which is put round chandeliers to keep away the flies. Lewis

smiled as he thought of the lovely soft dresses which Welsm was

producing that year in Paris. Nevertheless, as she stood there before

him, her legs slightly apart, her stomach forward, her figure erect, she

looked like a figure of "Victory."

"Do you mind if I put out the light? It attracts the mosquitoes," he

said.

Suddenly they found themselves in the gloom, just a man and a woman on

whose races the uncertain light traced latticed patterns. The scenery

had changed just as much as they had. The mountain spurs projected

violently out of the darkness, leaving the ravines which separated them

still plunged in it. In the square in front of the church, and lower

down in the Giardini, the town bands (it being Thursday) were playing

two different airs from the same Verdi opera. A diadem of acetylene

flares at the prows of the fishing boats quivered on the sea. Now and

then one of the beams was broken by a flash of darkness; a fisherman's

arm brandishing a harpoon.

They seemed to be suspended between the dark masses of the sky and of

the earth, in a double lighting, one a geometrical light along the

pavements, and the other an irregular poetic light in the sky.

She went on:--

"The Franco-African Bank cannot develop deposits like those of San

Lucido, which require the very latest machinery plant and highly

technical advisors. You will be compelled either to sell out or to float

a new company. Perhaps you have already decided to do this? I know that

if you don't it won't be for want of capital, but still.... Would you

like to share? To come to an agreement or, as we say in Greek, a

'symphony.' Would you let us subscribe thirty per cent, of the capital,

but with shares carrying plural votes? You will always be wanting lire

here, and Trieste is a place whose co-operation is not to be despised."

"Especially as the Italian exchange brokerage is particularly in your

favour, being supported by the purchaser to the extent of one-quarter

per cent.

"We are not Italians, monsieur," she replied with dignity, "but Greeks,

and our brokerage is the English brokerage."

Lewis looked at her standing there in a kind of phosphorescence. He

thought, until he saw her smile, that nothing could be brighter than her

face; a big Grecian face with strong lines, like the too modern cameos

in the shops of the Vomero. A straight, honest mouth, a mouth made for

truth. Eyes whose gaze one could not imagine having to be lowered, and

which were steadier and saw further than the eyes of women. Black hair

plastered down like that of her Tanagra sisters. And for all that a

certain eighteen thirty romanticism about her forehead....

"At any rate," she went on insistently, "would you be willing to dispose

of a part of your concessions to us? We would be able to bring you

co-operation of the very finest kind in exchange."

She spoke with a precision which contradicted all that is said about the

music of words and all that is known of language; an incomparably pure

French, that is to say, a perfect use of idiom, courteous, clearly

articulated and rich in metallic nasal sounds, without the least foreign

accent, without any of those slipshod constructions, fashionable

clippings and slovenliness of everyday speech. Powerful without being

violent, and full of dignity.

Whilst she was talking Lewis kept asking himself whether he would ever

be able to put to her those questions which he was accustomed to put to

women with that familiar and chaffing air of authority which he found so

successful. But he felt that she would either not reply or would tell

him the honest truth (is there any other kind?), and he dared not risk

it.

For the first time he had the impression of having before him a person

who was completely confident, and that any opinion she might issue was

fully guaranteed.

Nevertheless, in the darkness her voice became warmer, softened a

little, and betrayed a certain wilfulness.

Lewis then realized that he had not heard a word she had said, and had

only been listening to the sound of her voice; he had to give her some

reply.

The jasmin suddenly made its double perfume felt.

"I am very sorry, madame," he said, "but everything you suggest is

impossible. We have decided to develop the property ourselves."

PART TWO

I

LEWIS never woke in the morning with the heavy eyelids of Burgundy

drinkers whose kidneys have been working all night, or the bloodshot

eyes of the student, or the purple wedding rings round the eyes of

lovers, or the dank locks of dancers on the morning after a ball, or the

gambler's skin in which one can see a reflection of the green cloth.

From the bedclothes issued the strong irregular features of a man of

thirty which, lifted in the middle by the narrow ridge of the nose,

seemed to fall gently away along the slope of the cheeks. His day-old

beard accentuated the heaviness of his jaw.

Lewis had no office furniture or desk. Neither card indexes nor Turkey

carpets nor crocodile skin armchairs. He never worked anywhere except in

his bedroom, like a poetess. The same pieces of furniture which saw him

when he was ill, or daydreaming amongst books scattered on the floor, or

staying in for days, or entertaining queer companions, also witnessed

his labours as a business man. In his Buhl bureau there was one drawer

for files, one for handkerchiefs, one for memoranda, one for

hairbrushes, one for engineers' reports, and one for marginal deals (all

his cheques smelt of brilliantine).

When Martial came along in the morning, he was more like a provincial on

his way through Paris coming to see a friend to pass the time, than a

secretary with the mail. If Lewis was going out all night Martial found

a note pinned to the pillow with instructions for buying and selling

when the market opened, the people whom he wanted to see if they called,

etc.

But the house soon filled up, for Lewis was always known to be in during

the morning. Clients, Stock Exchange runners, commission agents and

brokers began to arrive. The telephone rang continuously in a sharp

querulous way, punctuated by the alphabetic hail of typewriters. A

private exchange was installed at the head of his bed, keeping him in

touch with his offices, his engineers, his desk at the Bourse. (When he

woke late he could listen to the tidal sound of buying and selling from

the depths of his bed clothes.) All this agitation, this modern comfort,

this life of violence, of expenditure of nervous energy and of

speculation was in curious contrast with the portly seventeenth-century

mansion in a leafy road on the Rive Gauche. Through the windows a Le

Nôtre garden unfolded itself, restored in every detail (even to a

reinforced concrete pergola) by the actual owners, who were Mexicans.

The trees and artificial lakes were blue with frost, for it was

mid-winter. There was nothing to remind one of Sicily but some labelled

samples of sulphur in a bowl, and occasional patches of ultramarine in

the sky.

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

question.

"I am only an amateur, really," he used to say. "I don't work to 'woo

the fickle goddess Fortune' or to be a 'money baron' or any of the other

Yellow Press expressions. I work to amuse myself. Negotiating loans

amuses me more than yachting, and floating companies more than playing

poker. That's all it is."

Lewis did not lay the results of his journey to Sicily before the

directors of the Franco-African. Obstinately, in accordance with his

first idea, he got together the necessary capital and floated a limited

company on his own account; the share certificates were being printed.

As soon as they were fully issued he would have them quoted on the Paris

Bourse; in a year they would be quoted at Trieste and in New York. A

whole army of technical men, chemists, mechanics, etc., was on its way

out. Lewis counted on work being seriously begun at San Lucido by the

end of the month.

The effect of this satisfactory state of affairs on him was to develop

in him a moroseness almost amounting to neurasthenia. Like many men of

his generation, Lewis was at once practical and imbalanced,

matter-of-fact and neurotic. He complained that success clung to him

like a "bad patch" to a gambler. He always made a profit even from the

riskiest ventures; it was about this time that the Steel and Smelting

Company managed to keep four huge furnaces of two hundred and fifty tons

capacity each alight at Gebel Hadid, in spite of the industrial crisis,

and everyone knows in what an enormous profit that resulted. What

irritated him most was the impression of success he gave everyone, when

all his successes were far smaller than he expected. He had left the

card room at the club the day before because he was bored with winning.

"Financiers," he said, "are only clear-sighted in financial matters. It

is a gift, a kink; in everything else they're idiots. The entire French

nation goes in for nothing but finance. It's the last straw."

Was Lewis in love with Irene?

He had imagined himself so often to be in love, always either stopping

himself or being stopped in due course, that he did not like to answer

the question. He would have been afraid of driving himself into it.

Lewis imagined that he lived in perfect harmony with himself in a kind

of solitary egoism from which he never emerged save to satisfy his

instincts, and he meant to go on living like that. It must not be

forgotten that Lewis had no great strength of character. Very far from

it. He always said that in love it is never dangerous to hit above the

belt. He did not believe in too much self-examination. Neither pride nor

personal integrity mattered to turn, as he always acted on impulse. His

reflexes stood him in the stead of morals and education.

This indifference did not now prevent him from feeling his heart sink

occasionally beneath the load of some obscure weight, some feeling of

uneasiness. Where did this chronic condition originate? In Sicily?

His self-esteem had not been called into play at all. At no moment had

he, as the Orientals say, "lost face." Quite the contrary. And yet, ever

since those few words which he spoke to put an end to the conversation

of that one evening, he had felt himself dominated, kept in check by an

invisible will, by the emanations of a personality whose influence

neither distance nor time could weaken. On the occasion of Pascal's

centenary, Lewis had read in his diary some of the thoughts of that too

little-known author. He remembered one: "The first effect of love is to

inspire a profound respect." It had made him laugh, and then it had made

him think. As a rule he only thought of Irene as of a business rival.

Sometimes as a human being as well. But that any woman was not made to

sacrifice herself (to him, of course) amazed him; that a woman could

have any duties unconnected with love shocked him.

Lewis sought for help against these strange and new sentiments which

beset him amongst other people. Most of them failed him, as usual. But

he had at least the consolation of taking hostages and sacrificing

victims.

II

MADAME MAGNAC was not the least of these.

Lewis upbraided her for surrounding herself with armorial bindings and

greyhounds; for giving people wines so old that they had gone bad; food

so cooked that there was nothing left of it. For being a slave to

appearances, for having one of those Christian names that age with the

years, which is serious, but which do not age with their bearers, which

is awful. For being afraid of divorce for provincial reasons, disguised

behind the bigotry of the Faubourg Saint Germain. He began to hate her

drawing-room, which looked like a room on the Classic stage. He prated

of purity: Madame Magnac retorted, not inappropriately, that women are

what men make them. He was irritated with her misquoting Taoist

philosophers, with her beginning to wear a tired look (she looked like a

shop-soiled book fading in the window); with her wealth of which she

made no worthy use; with her pre-war figure; with her salon which was

nothing but a society clinic; with her snobbishness, which classed and

unclassed her; with her proud bearing, which disguised a thousand

weaknesses; with her artistic taste, which was really nothing but a form

of vigilance--which to a certain extent everyone possesses; with her

jadishness, the distribution of her favours (all the more because she

did not even trouble to keep her infidelities from him); with her

telegrams to crowned heads, with the inevitable replies from their

secretaries; with her lies and her habit of calling the Duc de Vendôme

by his Christian name when he wasn't there; with her lack of candour and

charm; with her pretensions to exoticism, continually taking things up

and dropping them again; with her Marcel waves; with her tiaras of

kingfisher feathers, which gave her the grotesque and ridiculous

appearance of an Arlesian effigy; with her bath sunk into the floor;

with her mania for being in the midst of everything whilst pretending to

live the life of a recluse; with her way of answering when anyone asked

if she intended to be present at a party to which she had not been

invited: "I really cannot, I have had to go on strike."

III

LEWIS lived alone. He took his meals in his room, went to bed at nine

o'clock and pulled the bedclothes over his head the better to isolate

himself; he pursued his thoughts without much result, but at any rate

with honesty. He began to find limitations in himself. Was he good, or

only pitiless?

He was aware of having changed, of no longer being what he had been a

year before at that time. So that, without quite having lost confidence

in himself, he was no longer sure that he could do anything he liked and

that anything could either be bought or seized. He began to ask himself

of what use he was in this world. Every time he met a good woman who

avoided his gaze his heart seemed to falter.

IV

FROM a taste for poverty, Lewis began to spend a great deal of money.

No longer furnishing his house according to his needs, he began to

decorate it according to a definite scheme. Artistic objects had

cluttered up his room like old iron in the liberated regions of France.

He turned them all out. He began to study the best periods of art. Aided

by his instincts, he soon passed through the lower stages, coming back

to first principles by abstract methods, like all Modernists. He grasped

the fact that an age like our own is great enough to disregard

tradition.

He no longer visited the shops to which Madame Magnac used so often to

take him after lunch. He avoided those old curiosity shops which had

grown up since the war, like cheap eating houses round a racecourse.

From the insipidity of the by-products of the eighteenth century, which

hung their sky-blue bows in the Rue la Boétie, alarmed by the

propinquity of negro masks, and jostled by the rigid interpretations of

Cubist masters, to the farmhouse furniture of the Boulevard Raspail

which was handed over to specially bred worms to eat, passing by the

German antiquaries of the Place Vendôme where our rickety

fifteenth-century Madonnas dwell in shivering captivity. Those dismal

rooms furnished with "association pieces," those beds made for guilty

passion in dimly-lit Louis XVI rooms, and which one sees lit up by motor

head-lamps in the Faubourg Saint Honoré in the evenings, the delicate

china which quivers at the change in the value of the pound sterling and

the passing of omnibuses, all these things disgusted Lewis; he was

disgusted by the little plump hands of the art experts, organizing the

emigration of all this poor French furniture created for solitude, grace

and modesty, and which would turn up again in the antipodes, probably

upside down.

V

THE days followed each other as monotonously as long-distance runners

with their numbers on their backs like the leaves of a calendar.

Lewis no longer went anywhere and refused all invitations. He catalogued

his books. He gnawed the ends of his pencils and bit through his pipes.

He got pleasure out of wasting time. "I am out of work," he said, "and I

am learning to be lazy."

When Martial expressed surprise, asking him: "Are you preparing for your

examination of conscience?"

Lewis replied: "I have work to do for which I am not sufficiently

equipped."

"What work?"

"Indulgence, patience and the confutation of errors."

"Poor old chap," decided Martial, "I don't know who it is, but you've

certainly got it badly this time."

VI

"BY the way," said Lewis, without guarding against the association of

ideas, "what do you think of that?" And he held out to Martial a

telegram that had come from Pastafina that morning.

"Do you know that this business, which at first seemed so perfectly easy

to run, is beginning to worry me seriously?"

"It's always the same story. I don't like these affectuosissimo and

dilatory replies followed by complete silence."

And yet six weeks before a party of carefully chosen engineers had been

despatched to San Lucido. Their prospecting continued to have excellent

results, but so far not a stroke of actual work had been done. Formality

after formality with an anti-French municipality ended in nothing but

further checks, and permission to construct the railway line past the

foot of Battaglia had been refused, in spite of an appeal to the Courts;

they had had to face the prospect of getting their produce to the shore

by a service of lorries which was rendered precarious by the absence of

fuel supplies and an execrable road.

When the question arose of the establishment of an outlet to the sea and

the utilization of the creek nearest to the works (the very one where

Lewis used to bathe) it was far worse: the Company certainly possessed

the authority and the possibility of building piers fairly quickly for

loading ships; but they found that though, as shown on the maps, there

was quite enough water, there was a chain of reefs just outside which

made it dangerous for cargo boats to approach in rough weather. And so

they had to consider loading from tenders on the high seas. After

several attempts this had to be given up and they turned to the west, to

Marmarole; there the land at the back of the south jetty was admirably

adapted for the disposition of sheds and warehouses. But when they

decided to make use of it, they were told that all the land had been let

a short time before (the deal had been carried through in haste

anonymously, and nothing had been done with the land since). Labour

problems became more and more complicated: where before labour had been

scarce, it had now disappeared altogether; where labour could be found

the Trades Unions demanded such high wages that it was useless to start

work. The emigration offices, the local Press, the local authorities,

the Labour Bureau, the election agents, even the delegates of the Mafia

seemed for once to be at one, banded together against this French

undertaking. In whose pay were all these people? Lewis instituted

enquiries. Some interesting facts came to light. Soon the hand of the

Compagnia Pascali of Palermo appeared; behind them, issuing orders to

them, a combine of Malto-Italian banks whose instructions were

discovered to come from No. 8 Via Petrarcha, Trieste; in other words,

from the Apostolatos Bank.

VII

SOME time after this Lewis went to supper with a famous Champagne

merchant who, in spite of his age and a rather assailable position,

still financed a good number of charming little ladies.

After crossing one of those streets in the Champ de Mars which seem to

be cut in butter, Lewis entered a little house at an hour when there

were no longer any servants about: anyone who liked could go in by the

open door. Unlike the Magnac Salon, it was an unfashionable house, in

other words an amusing one, full of pretty women and good vintage wine

(that pink 1911, like disguised raspberry syrup), and where no expense

was spared for the entertainment of the guests; even to the extent of

having gifts beneath every napkin. The host was celebrating that evening

the thirtieth anniversary of a secret malady which had not interfered

with his tempestuous mode of life. To this party, of which Paris had

been talking for weeks, he had invited all the specialists who had

treated him during these thirty years, and even the lady to whom he owed

what was, after all, so little worry, and whom he discovered at Laval

where she ran a church furnishing shop. She sat opposite him at the head

of his table, wearing a bonnet and a dress of Alençon lace.

Lewis was at the daffodil table (each table being named after a colour),

next to Hector Lazarides who was sucking at his Homard à l'Americaine

and wearing a helmet with a nose-piece which made him look like the

Greeks of Pericles in Duruy's manual. Lazarides was an old Greek

parasite who, after twenty centuries, still remained the Gnatho of

ancient comedy, and who lived in an attic facing the Tuileries in a

hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. A gay old sentimental corsair, he hawked

things about, looked after his friends' wives and took them out, stayed

in bed when he had no victims, "fallen between two mugs," he used to

say, or, "in the dead season," and if by some oversight he was asked

down to the country he never left. (To such a point that the Prince de

Waldeck had to have the wing in which he had put him up for one night

pulled down after two years in order to get rid of him.) He was always

asking people to find him something to do. When anyone offered him a job

he would refuse with dignity, saying: "I can make more than that by

borrowing." An impecunious old snob, he had only abandoned the

scepticism of a lifetime at the sight of his fallen monarch, whom he set

about serving with a guilty fervour. But even this did him no good,

because far from his Francophobia strengthening his social position in

Paris, as it generally does. Fate willed that people should frown on it;

so that he was thenceforth, like this evening, forced to spend the night

amongst the higher strata of commerce.

He could not be too civil to Lewis, taking off his helmet, bowing his

head on which three hairs still curled like electric bell wires. Lewis

brought the conversation round to Greece and to Irene.

"But I knew her quite well as a child!" cried Lazarides, "at Aix, at

Nauheim, at Zalzomazziore (he exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness

the lisp that Trieste Greeks have borrowed from the Venetians). She used

to look after her father, a choleric old gentleman who was always

blackguarding his servants and distributing five franc pieces amongst

the little ladies who called him 'papa.' I saw her again as a young girl

in Rome. There she married Pericles Apostolatos who, following the Greek

custom, was old enough to be her father; he was at school with me at

Condorcet. He killed himself two years ago after some unsuccessful

speculations. As he was only a trustee, his personal fortune passed to

the creditors; but as Irene is a modern young woman she went into

business with the help of her cousins, paid her husband's debts and

built up his fortune again; now, as you probably know, she is

practically the head of the Apostolatos Bank. Such a thing is unheard of

in the history of Greece. She is a thoroughly excellent girl and she

hasn't had much of a time. Brought up in our old school. You Parisians

have no idea of what that means, what an awful thing youth can be, shut

up in those huge Oriental houses whose doors never open save to admit

the cephalonite priest who comes to teach the _Pistevo_, our creed, and

then a premature marriage, often by proxy."

"And yet," said Lewis, "I have met young Greek girls at Marseilles,

playing tennis on the courts in the Avenue de la Cadenelle...."

"The Marseilles Greeks are middle-class people who try to make

themselves pleasant to the French and to marry into the local families.

There is no connection between these and ancient Hellenic strongholds

like Trieste. There the aristocracy is closely hedged round,

impenetrable, and no misalliances are possible. They will have none of

the little dowry-hunting Italian Counts, and they marry big black satyrs

who talk through their noses and, grunting like pigs, make huge wedding

presents, of Viennese taste, to their brides. It's nothing to laugh at.

Think of these charming little girls going off with their languorous

eyes to conquer the _gambros_, the betrothed, followed by their

families--those Greek families which move all together like migratory

sardines in the Mediterranean: abruptly to be shown the secret of life,

and then to be worn out with motherhood and submerged for ever."

Having spoken, Lazarides blew into a little limp skin which he had in

the palm of his hand, and this became a green duck which took flight

over the table with a penetrating scream and was killed by someone with

a fork.

The conversation was interrupted by a stag hunt through the house in

which the manager of a big bank in the Place Vendôme took the rôle of

the stag with the pegs from the hat rack. It ended in a porphyry bath

where the hard-pressed animal and taken refuge, the tails of his coat

floating amongst the strawberries which the hot water had made it

impossible for him to retain.

When the party broke up at dawn, their feet sunk in the rainy pavement

beneath the Eiffel Tower slumbering above the clouds, Lazarides went

home charged with an important mission which he alone could bear to

Trieste, by those mysterious primitive telepathies of the Greeks, which

are the wonder of the western world: Lewis, after some very bitter

moments, had resigned himself to begging to inform that he was ready to

negotiate and to give up part or, if necessary, the whole of the mines

of San Lucido.

What reply would he get to these overtures?

VIII

TO right and left of Lewis the motors purred evenly, changing their song

occasionally with the wind. He was in front, in a sort of veranda

commanding the English Channel; between his knees he held a paper bag in

which to give up his soul if the passage were rough. But the weather was

fine and the aeroplane floated on the elastic air, now and then leaping

lightly over invisible dips and charging seemingly impenetrable clouds.

Lewis read, without understanding them, Freud's three essays on

sexuality, which cause the barrier of innocence to recede to such an

alarming extent. Occasionally he raised his eyes and saw before him

through the incurved windows, the sea pink-tinted by the setting sun,

rippling away into space like a tapioca pudding. Held up by little

half-inches of sail, the fishing fleet was entering Boulogne, six

thousand feet below. Preening themselves with their little wisps of

smoke, tugboats were preparing to drop their anchors for the night

beyond the jetty. Lewis laughed as he saw beneath him the ports, roads,

stations, all this human material of another age. Behind him some

Americans were discussing the rates of exchange with the roar of gold

machinery in their mouths, and at the very end of the fuselage lay boxes

of frocks, a ton of morning papers and cherries at five francs each for

Piccadilly.

The sand dunes of France disappeared and with them those brackish swamps

where the salt leaves tracks like those of snails. Soon Lewis found

himself over the well-nourished English downs. (No, England is not

scraggy, she is only a little low chested.) A model for an ideal

country. France from a bird's eye view is like a patchwork quilt; it is

all used up in samples: mosaic fields cut up into strips whittled away

at each end by the succession laws. Roads so straight that they might

have been cut with a knife, breaking away at the villages round which

they make rectilinear patterns, like the petals of meagre flowers. The

English country road is less rational and less sensible, but much more

shady and companionable.

Dusk was falling. A blue mist was rising, covering everything but the

billowy tree tops and the pointed roofs of the coast houses. Then came

the London suburbs out of which the crowds seemed to rise like bubbles

to the surface of a pond full of organic matter, and the first trams

with their headlights and BOVRIL in letters of flame. It was only light

now in the sky. Why do we say that night falls? Surely it rises. At last

the motors died down, the propellors appeared suddenly, the travellers'

ears began to sing, and each blade of grass became gigantic as it swayed

in the rush of air: Croydon aerodrome.

How far from Le Bourget, left only two hours before, far from the

Abattoirs and the Flanders road bordered, as if by geraniums, by

slaughtered pigs and petrol pumps, towards the stony desert of the

aerodrome where the huge aeroplanes sweating green oil sleep in their

reinforced concrete stables. Where was the stream of pretty painted work

girls, so lissom and exotic, leaving their work in Paris like Seville

cigarette makers? Here one fell right into the arms of the Anglican

Church. Sunday: Evensong: the 5th chapter of the Gospel according to

Saint Matthew. The country offered to the traveller not the dismal

countenance of a railway station, but a green countryside, with

new-washed cheeks. Let us make a chimney descent into the heart of the

English home. In the clubs the diners were allowed, for that evening

only, to dine in day clothes. On the Sabbath, that weekly day of

catalepsy, the basements of the houses were all shut up and the servants

who lived there were at church; the Salvationists sang in a South

Eastern Railway tunnel in which the smoke obstinately lingered; the

Israelites, who are opposed to the silk hat habit, were returning home

from the symphony concerts; the playing fields were empty, under a

curse; not a wisp of smoke came from the chimney pots, for everyone was

having cold supper. The only places open were the fire stations and the

public houses reeking of leather and malt.

Lewis was driven to London to a hotel in the Strand. His room looked out

over the Thames, which at this point traces a soft silvery curve towards

the Houses of Parliament. He opened his bag and took out the files in

it. He stared for a moment at the one on which was written "San Lucido"

in blue pencil. He shrugged his shoulders wretchedly.

IX

THE next morning at about midday Lewis walked up Fleet Street towards

Old Jewry where the Apostolatos Bank had its London branch.

Fleet Street bows down and sags beneath the weight of the railway bridge

and of bundles of newspapers and then, as though shot up by a spring

board, leaps up Ludgate Hill towards St. Paul's Cathedral, scales it and

rises to the copper pink sky. On the hoardings are views of Wales with

blue skies as deceptive as the Celts themselves; on another poster a

gentleman in a quilted dressing gown is smoking by his fireside

surrounded by children playing amongst his legs like lion cubs, pictures

which appear to excite the natural laziness of the natives.

Lewis skirted St. Paul's to where the unfrosted windows of the wholesale

merchants begin, and came at last to the old Jewry and the Apostolatos

Bank, an Adam house, ivory white outside and painted inside in sea green

and dark brown in Dickensian shades, with the legend on the door in

black letters:--

APOSTOLATOS BANK

FOREIGN BANKERS, FOUNDED IN 1846.

FREIGHTAGE, ADVANCES ON MERCHANDISE.

BRANCHES AT ATHENS, SALONICA,

ARGOS, KALAMATA, CORFU, NAUPLIA,

LARISSA, VOLO, CANEA, MYTILENE.

_Special shipments to the Piraus._

These Greek names, torn from coasts so tormented that Reclus compares

them to the convolutions of the human brain, exiled to the north like

the metopes of the Parthenon, sparkled here with such Oriental fire that

Lewis blinked. They recalled to him warmth, sweet lemons and the

Mediterranean so full of salt that it makes marks like fruit stains on

one's clothes.

The ground floor contained wooden counters and ledgers like antiphonals

as tall as the book-keeper himself, bound in whole ox skins and studded

with brass nails. This entrance was like the window of Lock's hat shop,

and bore witness to the venerable age of a firm which, though foreign,

claimed respect as a right by virtue of its good old English methods and

neatly a century of commercial probity.

In the upper stories everything had been altered; polished brass plates

replaced the black painted letters, and the old folios had been

dethroned by American filing devices. Worked by a one-armed sergeant

plastered with medals, modern lifts sucked the customers upwards to the

roof. On the third floor Lewis passed through the general office, where

an army of youths with heads shining like patent leather boots worked

behind polished bars, and was introduced into the private offices of the

Bank: a thick pile carpet, frosted windows and enamelled spittoons with

the encouraging inscription: "Make sure of your aim"; in the anteroom

those outward signs of English commercial standing: silk hats and

umbrellas.

The drum of the revolving door beat the salute and the three directors

of the Apostolatos Bank, supported by their general manager, Mr. Rota,

rose to their feet. They were waiting for Lewis in the middle of the

huge office lined with strong boxes let into the wall, with portraits of

the Chairman of the Bank in 1846, 1852, 1867 and 1876 (all of them, even

though Greeks to the core, become either from vanity or necessity

English knights, Turkish pashas, Austrian barons, etc.; in each case

there was a change in the cut of the frock coat and the shape of the top

hat).

They examined one another. Lewis saw that beneath their ultra British

exteriors, their lounge coats, buttonholes and fancy trousers of City

men, he was dealing with Orientals, jealous, passionate, untutored, sons

of men who had specialized in exactly the same kind of business for a

century, negotiating it with tradition, patience and greed; in fact the

exact opposite to himself. Their skin, in contrast to that of their

English subordinate staff, was yellow.

Some Samos wine was brought and they got to work. They worked quickly,

these Greeks having sacrificed to Anglo-Saxon methods their natural

taste for verbiage and quibbling.

The conditions were as follows:--

The Apostolatos Bank were prepared to take over the San Lucido property

for the sum of £150,000 sterling. In addition, they would refund the

money spent on works concessions, on commissions and adjudications, and

the sums advanced for harbour dues. The Greeks were also to take over

the material already brought to the spot and would compensate the French

Bank for the two waterfalls already harnessed and for the turbines

installed, even taking over the dynamos then on their way between

Marseilles and Porto Empedocle. In consideration of this, 167,000 shares

(out of the 200,000 which Lewis controlled) would pass into their black

Palikar paws.

At this moment a boy brought in a message.

The oldest, Pisistrates, his skull as bare as a Greek landscape, pulled

out his watch:--

"My cousin Irene has telephoned to say she will be a few minutes late.

She only landed from Trieste this morning. It is essential that she

should be here for the exchange of signatures."

X

"ARE you going back to the West End?"

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

said Irene.

"Let me drive you back."

"I'd much better drive you back to your hotel; I've got a car."

"Well, as a matter of fact, I want to talk to you," said Lewis, bluntly.

"Very well, then."

They went out together and crossed the road through the lunch-time

traffic, through the crush of lorries and buses wedged together like

pack ice and loaded to bursting point, in the canyon-like streets,

between the streams of people emitted from the offices to be swallowed

up underground or to lunch standing up in bars and in A.B.C. tea shops.

They got out at Knightsbridge Barracks. The last of the morning riders

were coming in, and already the afternoon hacks, loose-jointed, with

lack-lustre coats and harness, smelling of the livery stable, were

taking possession of the Row. They went obliquely across the grass

dotted with big trees, whose branches were as regular as those of

genealogical trees; English girls wearing imitation amber necklaces were

going home, with novels bound in green cloth under moist armpits,

accompanied by long limp youths who walked with bent knees, carrying

their hats in their hands.

"Just now in that office you frightened me even more than you did in

Sicily," said Lewis.

"And now?"

"Not so much now. When you are doing nothing you are much more like

other women. I've often thought of you.... Are you romantic?"

"No, romance was invented by people who have no hearts. Personally, my

thoughts have been of San Lucido."

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

know how to persevere."

"And you are a good business man because you know when you are beaten."

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

said Lewis, softly.

"Don't be silly. You gave in because you couldn't do anything else. You

were heading for financial quicksands when the time came to pay. You've

got a cool head so you cut off a finger to save your hand, as they say

at the Bourse."

"Financial quicksands for the Franco-African?" asked Lewis. "For a

little matter of six million lire?"

"It's nothing to do with the Franco-African," retorted Irene, calmly.

"It's you. You've been acting all through this business entirely on your

own account without consulting your Board. Do you think I don't know

that? You acted from pride, as I should possibly have done myself. In

proportion as your difficulties increased--and I don't deny that I

helped--your personal resources, or those of your friends, diminished. A

time comes when the fight of one against many becomes impossible, don't

you see? I knew you could appeal to your backers. But I also guessed

that you would rather give up the mine than lay the situation before

them when it was going badly. Wasn't I right?"

Lewis kept his eyes fixed on the ground. "Yes," he replied, furiously,

"of course you are right."

There was a short pause.

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

you a woman?"

The blood rushed to Irene's face and flooded it with a soft pink. Her

eyes grew misty and her mouth trembled.

Lewis saw that he had hurt her. He grew calm at once.

"Is there pain in your heart or only in your eyes?... Please forgive me.

I only meant: why do you always think before you speak, why do you never

smile, why don't your pupils dilate with interest when you are being

discussed? Why do you think of what other people are doing?"

Irene could not get past his previous statement.

"It isn't that. Don't make fun of me. What did you mean when you asked

me why I was not a woman? Is it because I am well-balanced? It is a

perfectly natural balance."

"I am naturally well-balanced, too," replied Lewis. "I can walk about in

the dark with a glass of water without spilling a drop."

She interrupted him.

"Don't treat it as a joke."

"Surely when one has being doing serious business one can laugh

afterwards? Would you rather I sulked over my defeat?"

"You always fall on your feet like a cat.... I don't like dreamers."

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

believe in mercy."

"I admire perfection.... We could go on like this all day. It is just

two o'clock, and when people are late for meals uncle Solon gets

sullen."

"Before leaving you," said Lewis, "one last question: there is nothing

subtle between us, is there?"