Irene shrugged her shoulders.

"Oh! dear, no."

"That's just what I thought," answered Lewis.

* * * * *

She left him without having lost any of her assurance or

self-possession. He had an impression of a brown clean-cut face, narrow

hips, stockings drawn tight over transparent ankles, a jumper which her

bosom hardly stretched, and a scarf knotted round her neck and floating

in the wind behind her.

But the deed giving up possession of the mines lay in the safe in the

city, duly signed, sealed and delivered.

Lewis watched her through Lancaster Gate. She went into a large house,

cream coloured like the others, with a built-out bay window through

which he could see little mahogany tables covered with silver boxes and

signed photographs. Lewis was not hungry. He wandered towards the Dutch

garden which winter had hardly touched and which, thanks to the box

hedges, kept its solemn lines, in keeping with the red and black brick

architecture of the Palace which shelters the aged servants of the

Crown. In the midst of the paved rectangle in this flowered cloister

with its wistaria pergola, freed from the source of his torment, Lewis

sat alone with a blackbird.

Everything encouraged him to live. The sun was tracing his majestic

course; it was like Sicily. And he had got rid of a worrying piece of

business.

Suddenly a cloud passed over the sun. The feeling of well-being left

him. All at once Lewis felt he was seeing things as they really were.

His destiny seemed to unfold itself before him.

"How cold it is now that she is gone," he thought, "how bored I am!"

Irene had revealed a great truth to him. He knew that the next time he

saw her he would ask her to marry him.

XI

THE next evening Lewis dined with the Apostolatoses in Bayswater.

A Gothic hall with elephant tusks and Italian cabinets made of ebony,

from which the inlaid ivory bulged, loosened by the hot air from the

heating apparatus; for the house was centrally heated: England was

already far away.

In the drawing-room upholstered in cherry-coloured damask, on a uniform

ground of crimson velvet, stood out black Khorasan enamels, minute

Giordès designs and delicate Sineh whorls. The drawing-room formed a

kind of atrium surrounded by a balcony of polished wood from which hung

Janina embroideries, Scutari velvets and huge mosque lamps decorated

with cyphers in relief. Between the windows stood an Arab saddle in

violet leather braided with gold, hung with all the weapons of an emir.

Other embroideries similar to those on the walls were displayed in glass

cases, but these got older and older and became finer and finer, more

difficult to see and more tiring to the eyes, going back to the period

of Byzantine lace.

When Lewis arrived, the company, as they say in Russian novels,

consisted of Irene and three other ladies, two of whom rose to their

feet. These were the old cousins of Irene, the Misses Apostolatos. They

stood one on each side of their paralytic old grandmother, a kind of

moody Napoléon, who, seated on a throne, followed the conversation with

a vacant face but an alert eye from which her thoughts seemed to

trickle. Beside her on the table was a half-finished game of patience.

Lewis expected that her three sons, the Old Jewry bankers, would be

there, but none of them turned up. Sir Solon Apostolatos, the old

father, came down at last in a velvet dinner jacket, preceded, as the

Rhodes hangings over the door lifted, by a fiercely hooked nose kept in

leash by the chain of his eyeglasses; he had bat ears, a close-cropped

beard and protruding eyes like those of the gold masks of Mycenæ, and

he wore a skull cap in the middle of his very scanty white hair.

In spite of his courteous greeting and the traditions of ancient Greek

hospitality, Lewis summed him up as being mean, eccentric and a bully.

"Please accept my compliments," he said.

He pretended to be deaf to add to his authority. Irene offered him her

slender cheek. He treated her harshly, as he did his daughters.

He made no allowance for youth, declared that everything easy or

pleasant was wicked, upbraided his daughters for forgetting birthdays,

for thinking themselves his equals and for living for nothing but

pleasure, even though they were both over forty and lived like nuns. He

also reproached them for being old maids, having done everything

possible to prevent them from marrying; they surrounded him with fear,

respect and admiration. He had once had a wife whom he killed by his bad

treatment of her. With Oriental jealousy, when he had to leave her to go

to the Bank he used to take down the unfortunate woman's hair and shut

it in a chest of drawers, taking away the key.

They sat at an overburdened table round which an old butler carried out

all sorts of funereal rites like those of the Orthodox Church, wandering

about as they wander round the churches in Athens act Easter. In the

centre of the table stood a bowl full of flowers whose object was not so

much to decorate the table as to hide the guests from one another,

thereby minimising the number of dreadful disputes and the threats of

expulsion from the house that devastated the family dinner at every

other course.

The food was plentiful. Oriental and heavy. But the old father, Solon,

was only interested in the china on which it was served.

"And now," he said, addressing Lewis and rubbing himself to get the uric

acid out of his joints, "you are going to have..."

Lewis waited expectantly for a tale of some noble vintage.

" ... my blue and gold Vincennes; there are only seventeen pieces left.

Prince V---- has two and there are three at South Kensington; I have got

the other twelve, which you see here."

There was no general conversation in honour of Lewis. The only subjects

discussed were family affairs, baptismal names, charity, Greek politics;

austerely formal discussions on liturgy, the size of Paschal candles and

so on.

Then followed long silences in which one listened to the old man

munching his anti-diabetic rusks.

Lewis remarked on the beauty of their pearls. Irene explained that uncle

Solon had rushed into a mad whirl of expenditure when confronted by the

fall of the drachma; inasmuch as he had been thrifty all his life

("Don't handle things too much," he said; "a gold coin disappears

altogether in eight thousand years"), now, feeling in his old age that

the end of all economy, patrimony and capitalism was approaching, he

disdained the arbitrary value of post-war money and never stopped

repeating, sometimes in a frenzy and sometimes light-heartedly, "Spend

the money, my children, spend the money!"

And so, without wanting to, just because they were accustomed never to

dispute this man's authority, the two sisters began to squander money,

returning each evening tired out, having spent the day ransacking sales,

stores and antique dealers' shops, and having changed their fortune into

utterly useless articles.

At night they shut themselves into, and all light out of their rooms,

put on a hundred thousand pounds worth of jewelry and sat and looked at

themselves in the glass.

Uncle Solon was repeating himself.

"In three years' time the entire organization of the world will have

changed."

He had two cruisers, costing two million pounds each, and a fortified

villa for Venizelos with underground cellars built at his own expense

for the "Cause."

"I don't want to offend you, uncle Solon," said Irene, taking the sort

of liberty with him that her ancestors used to take with Jove, "but,

personally, I think we ought to be more optimistic. I have given the

Prefect of Athens ten thousand pounds to reconstruct the prison."

XII

THEY went into the smoking-room, and whilst uncle Solon was plunging his

arms up to the elbows into a mahogany cabinet full of cigars with his

name on the bands, Lewis said:--

"I have a feeling that it was in the silence of a seraglio like this in

Trieste that you strangled my poor little San Lucido venture."

"Ah I to my jealous lord let my poor head be borne."

"Don't make fun of this house," answered Irene; "I love it just as it

is. I lived here as a girl; I was a day boarder at a Maida Vale school

then, and I was captain of the hockey team. I used to come back here

every evening when the fog begins to thicken and when the street singers

cast fantastic shadows on the walls and smile behind their make-up.

Yesterday I went up to my old room under the roof; it has been empty

since I left it. My bed, a very hard one, where I used to weave

ridiculous dreams, still stood in the corner."

"What sort of dreams?"

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

Interlaken still there."

"I want to see it, this room of yours."

"Why?"

"Just because ..."

"Just as you like," said Irene simply, without waiting to be begged.

"I collect famous rooms," said Lewis. "I have already seen Cecil Rhodes'

college rooms with his old cricket bat and his rhinoceros heads; Gaby

Deslys' room in Knightsbridge after her death: there I found her old

mother who had come from Marseilles too late, crying before a golden sun

rising above a cream velvet bed; the ceiling was a painted sky in which

aeroplanes were manœuvring: they were all the different machines flown

by the pilot who was her lover at that time.... And again, the bedroom

of the Empress Zita at Schœnbrunn, with her soap and towel just as she

left them in her flight. But all this is quite beside the point...."

Irene's room was enamelled white with a green ribbon running along it

like a water line, and two shiny chintz curtains covered with

hollyhocks. It was what thirty years ago would have been called a

symphony in white.

Lewis went up to her.

"You are still only a girl."

She stepped back.

"Let me alone."

Her nose twitched and her narrow nostrils dilated. Her brow, swept clear

of the abundant hair that grew slightly over her temples, caught the

light.

Lewis put his hands on her shoulders.

"I adore your prim face with all the romance lurking in it. Give me your

hand. Open it. Look, there I am in the middle of your line of Fate; here

I am again after climbing this mountain. You see: I've got to get there

sometime...."

"I am always told that I've got a man's hand, the hand of a pioneer, the

fingers of a banker, made to handle money; will you let me alone ..."

"Your slim figure, your long neck, your slender arms, your narrow

waist..."

"Let me alone."

"Your honest mouth and your Byzantine eyes, like the eyes in a peacock's

tail. I don't want you to be my mistress."

"Let me alone."

"Will you marry me?"

"Certainly not. I've been married once; that's enough for me."

"Irene, I think of nothing but you. I live only in expectation ..."

"Let me alone."

Lewis' hands began to make dark bracelets round Irene's wrists.

"I want to stay here with you. I can't leave you any more. I want to

grovel at your feet.... Tell me ..."

"Let me alone."

"Let me destroy you, burn you down and build you up again."

They spoke hoarsely, in whispers; they were struggling now, forehead to

forehead, like goats. Irene kept him at arm's length to prevent him from

"clinching."

At first he had made an effort not to throw himself on her, feeling that

for once this was not the right way. But from force of habit he let

himself go.

In falling they sank on to the bed. An English bed, that is to say a

bench made of stone. Irene tightened her limbs and crossed one foot over

the other for safety.

"Let me alone."

Lewis knelt on her with all his weight; the fabric of Irene's chemise

tore in his hand; their hearts beat together. Their faces were red from

being rubbed together so much. Lewis held one of the girl's hands behind

her back and kept the other motionless beneath her chin; hairpins

rained; the blue ribbons of her chemise slid off her shoulders.

"Let me alone, you're killing me!"

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

any woman.

"Forgive me," he said.

They were both out of breath, like boxers during an interval. Irene

shook out her hair and put it up again; her whole face shone from the

frame of her thick mane, which looked as if it was modelled in lead: it

altered her whole being: she was even more her own self.

"Naturally," said Lewis, "we shall never meet again after this."

"Why not? I'm not frightened of you."

She was bubbling over with emotion.

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

a little?"

"No."

"You're not angry with me?"

"I'm angry with myself for standing here calmly like this."

"Cut your hair off."

"Never."

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

the same firm?"

Irene smiled.

"No. Anything but that. Say good-night nicely like an Englishman and

go."

Lewis saw before him the abyss of the staircase. He took a few steps and

then with French impudence he turned and said:--

"I hate going like this. Give me something to take away, something that

belongs to you. Not a handkerchief, it's unlucky. I know, give me your

camisole. I'll keep it in my pocket book in memory of you."

She looked at him in bewilderment. She had never met a man like him

before.

"At least tell me of someone in Paris who loves you and knows you well,

to whom I can talk about you."

"I don't know anyone in Paris."

"Well, then, promise me one thing, before going back to Trieste you will

ring me up ... Ségur 5555. It's quite easy to remember."

With flaming cheeks and steady eyes Irene stood on the landing and

signed to him that she did not want to talk any more.

She watched Lewis go down the stairs.

XIII

WINTRY weather, with warm mists, good weather for the reawakening of the

larger saurians. Mauve arc lamps throwing their beams on the asphalt,

like lamps in recessed bedsteads shining on the sheets. The omnibuses

steeped their headlights in the wood block roadway as in some deep

canal.

He struck the Thames at Victoria Embankment, along which the tramway

cars, bearing up from the suburbs vegetable smells and dead leaves

caught in their trolley wheels, ran with great shrieking violin notes

that made one shudder like the playing of a Jewish virtuoso. In the

middle of the river, their noses to the tide, the barges slumbered

lethargically, like sombre prehistoric animals in the silvery stream.

Cleopatra's needle, whose proud erection tapered off into the fog, was

balanced on the opposite side of the river by the pylon of Lipton's

warehouse.

Lewis looked at Big Ben to see the time. He saw the Houses of

Parliament, that Gothic prison from which all modern liberty has sprung.

It was nearly midnight, the two hands being almost at the present arms.

Suddenly he remembered that the Continental boat train left in

twenty-five minutes. After all, what more had he to do in London?

He went to his hotel, had his luggage brought down, and caught the train

without having had time to change his clothes.

The Boulogne fishing smacks leaving the harbour before dawn, their sails

filled by the gentle breeze that precedes sunrise and with big fires on

their bridges which threw huge shadows of the fishermen on to the sails,

saw, not without some surprise, a passenger in dress clothes leaning

over the prow of the steamer and towering above the spray with his silk

hat.

Lewis had completely forgotten Irene.

As each wave broke Lewis thought of Irene.

XIV

IT is one of the great advantages of travel that one always gains

forty-eight hours before and eight days afterwards by not telling anyone

that one has started or returned.

Lewis did not go near Madame Magnac. He worked all day and stayed at

home every evening in the hope that Irene would ring him up.

One evening, towards midnight, he had turned out the light and was

thinking of her, far away, cut off from him by the sea, and yet, in this

room with him (she was in his arms, he was holding her so closely that

her breasts were crushed together), when the telephone bell rang. It was

like a pistol shot fired beneath his pillow.

It might be Elsie Magnac. He unhooked the receiver and suddenly Irene

was close to him, seemed to be sitting at the foot of his bed in the

dark: she had telephoned to him whilst he was invoking her, waking him

up, and taking advantage of his sleepiness to break his solitude and to

insinuate herself into one of those dark corners into which one's daily

worries retreat subconsciously during the night.

"Have you been thinking of me, Irene?"

She answered in a low constrained voice:--

"Of course."

She seemed so close that he could almost feel her breath. It left her

lips in front of her words; in a tenth of a second it crossed the earth,

as dead must talk to dead, coming across the rich soil land of Kent,

over Dover Castle, beneath the chalky sea, up the Boulogne sands, along

the capricious windings of the Seine, over the roofs of Paris, right up

to Lewis' right ear. Lewis was struck with the clearness with which one

heard at night, without any roaring or buzzing. The words she spoke

seemed fluid, unaffected by distance, and charged with meaning. Lewis

wanted to talk to her like a friend, but he found that he only knew her

well enough to call her endearing names.

"I am quite close to you, Irene."

That was all. They were cut off. The tragi-comedy of French

administration intervened. A young woman with a dry telephonic voice

asked him what his number was; then a man with a southern accent and the

voice of a policeman, apparently talking from the middle of a parrot

house, asked him who was calling him from London; to which he could find

no answer.

A few minutes later Irene got through again.

"I've got nothing more to say," she said, "have you?"

"Nor have I. I love you."

The words rang emptily on the edge of the mouthpiece. Lewis felt,

however, that at the other side of the Channel his words had struck

home.

"No," she said, and hung up the receiver.

"Either the telephone or the distance spoils her voice," thought Lewis,

"making it sound serious and taking away its charm." (Hitherto the

voices that woke him up at night rang with silvery laughter, merry

voices, saying, "Good morning, you"; younger voices, the staccato or

husky voices of little Paris ladies.) But this voice was that of a good

woman.

As Lewis was musing in the darkness of his room on the conversation

which had just taken place, already finding it difficult to remember it

all, so far off did it seem, almost like a conversation in a dream, the

telephone bell rang sharply; it was Madame Magnac.

"My dear boy, I am glad to hear you are back. I suppose you're off again

soon; all your business seems to take you so far away."

"Off again? Never, now that I have heard your voice," said Lewis.

"It is the last time you will have that enchanting pleasure," replied

Madame Magnac, disdainfully. "Foreign calls always have priority.

Good-bye."

After which Lewis found himself alone again.

XV

FOR a moment he wondered if he was going to feel hurt about it, then, as

nothing of the kind happened, he leapt with joy, and his spring mattress

bounced him up to the ceiling. He took his address book, his private

letters, even the little red notebook, and burnt them all. A feeling of

youth and self-confidence came over him, and in the silence of the small

hours, gave him a glimpse of a new life in which he would be more free

than he had ever been. He would be able to live quite a different life

to that made up of days strung together by artificiality. An entirely

new relationship with the world was unfolding itself. Irene must be his.

He opened the window. A black cat was crossing the grass plot. Factory

hooters sounded in the suburbs. Lewis did not want to be alone; he

dressed and went out. A lorry passed, loaded with carrots. He jumped on

behind as he used to do as a boy when he went to school, in spite of

severe admonitions. Dangling his legs and gnawing carrots, he crossed

Paris by tortuous streets, empty save for milk cans, and never stopped

till he reached the banks of the Saint-Martin canal, with its towpaths

and little low houses like a Flemish port. In order to assert itself,

already triumphing over the night, the light neglected nothing that it

could reach, especially all the smoothest parts of the landscape, the

water of the canal, the stone quays, the iron sides of the tugs. Through

the idle lock gates trickled a gentle gilded grey stream of water, whose

colour was not reflected from any glow in the east. The huge mass of the

warehouses was mirrored in the deep crimson waters of the canal. In the

holds of the barges could be heard the stamping of mules eager to resume

the towpath.

Things looked so simple and natural, neither fresh nor tired, fulfilling

their destinies and working towards the common end. Huge barges with

their cargoes of Belgian goods slept on the deep water.

After drinking a glass of white wine, Lewis walked about waiting for the

day to break and for the shutters to come down at the big Post Office in

the Rue du Louvre. Then he went in and composed a reply-paid telegram to

Irene on the steps. He explained that his life was over unless she would

be his wife.

Then he went home, took the receiver off the telephone, drew the

curtains and waited in the darkness, lying on his bed.

At midday a telegram was brought to him. He held it in his hands for a

while without opening it, then pushed it under his bolster, laid it on

his knees, on a chair, on the mantlepiece. At last, towards evening, he

found he had enjoyed the excitement long enough. He read:--

LONDON. 22.11.22. 14331 A.

Let's try.

Irene.

PART THREE

I

"IRENE, I've got a present for you," said Lewis.

"What is it?"

"I am going to give you my freedom. I am leaving the Franco-African. Are

you surprised, like everyone else? It is quite impossible to do two

things well at the same time, and I have decided to love you to

perfection. That will take up all my time."

"It's a dangerous outlook for me," replied Irene. "Imagine my anxiety."

"Since you are my wife ..."

"Considering the length of the journey, you are hurrying too much at the

start. You must be wary."

"No. For once in your life you have found a Frenchman who is not prudent

and acts without thinking of to-morrow, and you give him no

encouragement. Don't think too much of me for it; it is no sacrifice for

me. We live in an age when things leave us long before we leave them. I

know quite well when I shall tire of happiness, but I never know when

happiness will be tired of me: it took me by surprise; so I cling to it.

I can easily live without doing anything; I was brought up in England.

Why is it that French people always think that when a statesman is no

longer in office, when an author's books no longer appear in the shop

windows, or a business man neglects his office, he is going to die?

Besides, it isn't as if I were going to retire into the desert. On the

contrary, you know that I am at last emerging from my solitude."

"Which is preparation for boredom."

"No, for bliss. In spite of appearances, I was a lonely man, that is to

say a caveman, supremely selfish, hunting for his daily food, just

enough for himself. I regret it now. I've written a very tactful letter

to my Board of Directors, and I've got a year's holiday. As to the

Company, I just asked them to let me retire into your arms. Besides,

what am I leaving?"

"Don't break with anything, Lewis, believe me. Life is better without

shocks. You will soon regret your work and even your friends."

"I have passed the age for having friends. By now they have all met the

woman they were meant to meet. You know what women think of friendship

between men: it puts them in the shade. As for work ... I have never

worked. Modern business isn't work, it's plunder. I was going headlong

into old age with that over-agitation and lack of activity which are

typical of the present day. So far from being diminished, my resources

have increased since I've had you. I am learning to become human. My

first need is to adore you."

"Mine is to yield to you," answered Irene, "even though you are listless

and frivolous ... but I don't regret my foolishness any more. I need you

now that I have cut adrift from everything. You are my nearest

relation."

From the moment Irene agreed to marry a foreigner and to leave Trieste,

she also broke the bonds that tied her to her bank, her business life

being only an extension of her family life; without one the other became

impossible. There is no place for dreams in the counting-house homes of

Greek bankers. The unexpressed devotion, the professional admiration,

and the fraternal attachment which her two Apostolatos cousins had for

her behind the granite walls of the Trieste mansion, in a strange

atmosphere of strong room and harem, rendered precarious any form of

compromise, at which, besides, she knew that she herself would never

have been able to stop. Having built up her life on a basis of freedom,

she considered that she had a right (without realizing how impatient she

was to do so) to renounce it again.

There they both were, blissful, useless, a prey to a public happiness,

depending on one another as much as offer and acceptance do. They

remained suspended by a single thread above the pit dug by themselves,

and they rejoiced in their danger.

What was to be done now with their victory? Save when they dressed (and

in the peculiar vagrancy of dreams) they never knew a moment's solitude.

There was nothing unexpected or thrilling between them, nor any room for

jealousy. They belonged to each other in the most difficult of all

lighting: that of happiness.

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

Greece.

II

"I COME from L---- one of the northern Sporades. No, it is too small,

you will only find it on German maps. I've got a marble cottage there.

Don't be alarmed. It is deserted. Nobody will call on us."

They had embarked at the Galata bridge the day before, on leaving the

train. A forbidding rain-swept landscape. The cupolas of the mosques

were like big water-logged balloons which were unable to rise; every

year the Pera sky-scrapers increase in number and add to the general

depression; the river steamboats belch out clouds of Heraklian coal

which grits between one's teeth, and dreary Scythian mists creep up from

the Black Sea along the leaden Bosphorous. The driving rain soaked the

houses of Scutari, turning their silver grey wood black.

"In Turkey," said Irene, "it always rains."

"I suppose if the Greeks had come back to Constantinople the weather

would have changed completely."

Lewis tried to tease her, but she refused to see any humour in it,

concentrating in herself the undying hatred of Greek for Turk.

"You French people, with your literary flirtations with Turkey and your

blindness to her infidelities, are quite intolerable. Haven't you

understood the lesson of the war?" And Irene pointed with her finger to

the _Goeben_, a worn-out, unkempt hulk, but alive once more in front of

the Old Seraglio.

"But I'm not standing up for the Turks."

"Yes, you are."

"I'm not."

Irene heaved "one of those Greek sighs that make the Bosphorous

tremble," as Byron says.

Their boat did not leave till after breakfast. They went up to Saint

Sophia; at the gate of the mosque a sentry, before letting them in,

asked them whether they were Greeks or Armenians.

"I am a Greek subject," answered Irene proudly.

The Turk barred the way ferociously, and Lewis had to produce Irene's

new French passport.

"To think that we so nearly came back, we who are the guardians of

Christianity in the East, and that these fanatical, besotted, dishonest

Turks, who never knew how to do anything but massacre, are still here.

They want to get rid of all Greeks from Constantinople! They want to

have Turkish commercial houses and Turkish banks! It's too funny!"[1]

Lewis followed Irene across the prayer rugs and Byzantine paving of

Saint Sophia, dragging his feet shod in immense Turkish slippers like a

man on skis, and trying to keep Irene quiet. He had never seen such an

exhibition of contempt in the West; it was quite different to the

aversion of French and Germans, who even in their most terrible moments

remained human. Five centuries of the fiercest hatred shone in Irene's

eyes. She who was usually so calm could not control her fury. How could

a being so closely connected with him allow herself in a single instant

to be ravaged by feelings which he could not himself imagine? For the

first time Lewis felt that he had bound his life to a woman of an

unknown race. In the courtyard near a rococo fountain in marble and gold

which ran with gleaming water, peaceable ogres wearing the new astrakhan

fezes were smoking, sucking at the hookah tubes sheathed in blue velvet,

amongst the circling pigeons.

After leaving Constantinople, the ship put in towards evening at

Mudania, on the coast of Asia. They went on shore for a short time.

Hardly had they disembarked when they came across a lorry park abandoned

in an olive grove by the Greeks during their flight in the summer of

1922. Half smothered by mallows, saffron, asphodel and tobacco plants,

lay the skeleton of lorries supplied by the English, their wheels in the

air. Inscriptions and the number of their army corps could still be

deciphered on their sides.

"A whole Greek division surrendered here," explained the guide.

"Let's go. I'm going back on board," said Irene.

Her eyes were full of tears.

When Lewis woke the next morning, the steamer was leaving the

Dardanelles. It was hot. The sky had become vertical; seagulls were

floating on the waves as though on treetops in a waving forest, beneath

a sun unthreatened by any cloud. To the left Kum Kale protected by

Turkish batteries, Troy with its lizards and the coast of Asia; to the

right Sedd-el-Bahr so rich in human remains. Above the surface rose the

masts and funnels of sunken British troopships; a French cruiser was

just finally breaking up. Vegetation had suddenly disappeared, destroyed

by the extreme heat. There was nothing to keep the sky and the earth

apart. The clean line of the coast and the sea like woven metal lost

themselves in the distance. It was a fitting approach to the world of

heroes and of gods who make love in the hollows of the sycamores. Lewis

went below and entered Irene's cabin.

"Come up quickly," he said. "Here is the Mediterranean, your mother

sea."

When they reached the bridge Mytilene was already in view, scooped out

in the middle like a woman lying on her side.

[Footnote 1: The author does not hold himself responsible for the

opinions held by his characters.]

III

CLINGING to a rocky prominence, warm and brown as bread-crust, seamed

with long scars, and without an ounce of vegetable earth, lay the only

village on the island. A flight of cobbled steps led down to the little

harbour adorned by a few periwinkle-coloured boats and six empty

barrels. Houses made of unbaked bricks, cracked by the midday sun, a few

palms, laurels and cactus white with dust, all shimmering like glaciers.

Above these was the Apostolatos house, its embrasures edged with blue,

entirely built of marble inside and as cool as a glass of water. Its

first owners had fled in 1818 (the women with gold coins hidden in their

hair) to start trading at Odessa and later at Trieste, whilst a cadet

branch established itself at Bombay. The house had subsequently been

restored by Irene's two old aunts, who had lived there nearly all their

lives in the greatest affection; one day they left it after a bitter and

relentless quarrel; one, Hera, was a Venizelist, the other, Calliope, a

Constantinian. Irene had played as a child in this drawing-room

furnished with Second Empire buhl; in the room in which Lewis was

sleeping her mother had died.

Lewis sat on his trunk and looked about him. There was a lithograph of

King Otho on the wall and a large imaginative picture, turning black,

representing the massacre of Suli, where the Greek women threw their

children over a precipice rather than let them fall into the hands of

the Turks. He examined the furniture; a bed, a chair, a cracked ikon, a

water jar and a stove full of fruit stones dipped in resin. He looked at

his dusty feet and suddenly the weariness of the week's journey came

over him. Paris seemed to him all dewy, fresh and far away. Once more he

was being punished for his eagerness for travel. This leap into a wild,

romantic, uninhabited corner of the earth overwhelmed him. This feeling

of oppression sent him to sleep.

When he awoke he was rested, that is to say comforted; night was

falling; Irene was near him on the terrace, before the window, her eyes

fixed on the crest of a hill from which rose the mauve wall of a

leper-house.

"What are you thinking about, Irene?" She started, got up and came and

knelt by him.

"I was looking at this sea which never rises or falls (it was her

business woman's way of saying "this tideless sea")." "I seem, like it,

to be stagnating. I am so happy that I ask myself if I oughtn't to stop

living. The wise thing would be to sell out now, at the top of the

market."

As the evening fell the grasshoppers made a deafening noise. From the

mountain came the great holy scent of goat followed by a perfume of mint

so hot and so aromatic that one thought one was wearing a sprig of it

against one's chest all night.

IV

FOR six weeks Lewis lived on this islet where Irene was the only

unwithered thing. In the mornings he put on a veil and went fishing,

like Childe Harold,

Warming himself like any other fly.

On his return Irene would wait for him on the quay, surrounded by

children with blue shaved heads, by beggars of the old school, black,

shiny and wrinkled like olives. She would have been to talk to the

refugees from Asia Minor; before the lazaret, outside their tents held

down by stones against the Etesian winds, those prolonged winds which

bring the warmth and the birds back from the South; they had been

camping there for months; the women, still wearing their baggy trousers,

spun flax; men, crouching by the fires, cooked mutton on wooden skewers.

The meals eaten by Lewis and Irene were hardly less primitive. The fish

he caught were fried in a few drops of oil. Sweet peppers. Fruit. Water.

Lewis thought longingly of snipe stuffed with _foie gras_, and wanted to

exchange their small table for a larger one. Irene apologized, quoting

a Greek proverb: "A halfpenny-worth of olives and a pennyworth of

light."

Later, during the empty midday hours when the deserted street seems to

waver beneath the eddies of dust where the land breeze and the sea

breeze collide, Lewis took his siesta in the stillness of a kind of

solar midnight. Towards five o'clock he went out on to the balcony. Just

opposite lay the customs house, its miniature Parthenon front set into

the ochre barracks, over which the Greek flag floated, like a sky cut

into strips. Beneath the solitary eucalyptus, the proprietor of the only

Ford which was for hire (ΦOPΔ) invited his friends to sit on the torn

American cloth and to take long, motionless journeys. Donkeys came back

from the fields, so laden that only their ears and their hooves emerged

from the bundles of olive foliage. Above the leper-house rose a flat

blue-patterned moon.

"How could the Greeks have lived on these rocky rafts? Was it for these

remote and dreary fishermen, for this Southern European Ireland, that

the whole of romantic Europe had shed her blood and her ink?" Lewis

asked himself.

Twice a week he went down to the café to read _Le Journal d'Athènes_,

edited in French. There he met officials in white linen and black-rimmed

glasses who let their nails grow a yard long to show their contempt for

manual labour; the lighthouse keeper who willingly lent him his

telescope, out of the end of which he screwed marine panoramas, a

water-melon seller, the priest with his alpaca sunshade, bearded to the

eyes, his coiled hair streaming with oil, who they said had never

converted anything except drachmæ into dollars. There they drank bitter

coffee in little metal cups that burnt their fingers, and water so clear

that the priest, giving thanks to the blue sky, made the Greek sign of

the cross over it.

Alone of all Eastern nations the Greeks seem to have struck the happy

mean between sluggishness and fanaticism. It is a real feat. Lewis could

not accomplish it. Secretly, so that Irene should know nothing of it,

seated before this sea dotted with pointed sails, Lewis was

disintegrating from sheer boredom. He was succumbing to Mediterranean

anæmia, had chosen sluggishness, and was letting himself drift on in a

torpor akin to an agreeable demise. He really began to think that he was

dead.

One morning Lewis noticed that the public square was in a ferment. Two

men were standing on chairs and hurling their black fingers about. The

audience was shouting and answering them with raised hands, trying to

attract their attention; on inquiry Lewis found out that they were

arguing about rates of insurance and that they always gambled like this

at the beginning of the harvest of what are known as Corinthian raisins,

which was just about to begin. He began to gamble, too. It reminded him

of something.... Suddenly there before him, as in a fairy tale, stood

another Greek temple also full of enigmatic gods. It was half-past

twelve, and 1,500 miles away the Paris Bourse was about to open. Already

the earliest quotations were being made in the street. Groups of

runners, motionless as the square columns black with figures, pencil

marks and caricatures, were straining at the leash. In their oak

cubicles, behind green curtains, the bank representatives were taking

their final orders on their private wires. Then the bell rang and

pandemonium broke loose. The tide flowed in both directions up to the

baskets where the orders lost their individuality, swallowed up and

absorbed by cross entries, whilst in the greenish glass roof prices were

already going up in columns. What a lovely toy!

Sadly Lewis longed for the West, with its sloping roofs, its rivers full

of water, hard butter, the wide views of fertile country, the odourless

milk, scavengers, the Bois de Boulogne full of women wearing stays, his

old Martial, his spotless flat, Elsie Magnac, his other little friends,

warm or cold, even Waldeck with his Lavallière tie and his little

sideways hop. (Proust once said, "He looks like an aborted partridge.")

The Mediterranean appalled him with its volcanic rages, its spasmodic

mountains, its barren coast inhabited by sluggish people, its plains

scorched like railway embankments, its hard colours, and the monotonous

flow of classic torrents beneath the boisterous sun. Oh, for a little

grass! He could understand the nostalgia from which Queen Sophie of

Greece must have suffered when she asked permission from King

Constantine, her husband, to grow ivy on the Acropolis.

But Irene joined him, and while yet far off said anxiously:--

"You seem depressed; aren't you happy?"

This question was so tactless, so artless, that Lewis could only make a

gesture of despair, without daring to lift his eyes.

"Profoundly happy," he answered.

"I am asking you for the truth."

"Well then ... if you love me let's go back to Paris ... just for a

week. I feel I shall go mad if I don't see a cloud soon, if you can

understand that."

V

THEY went back. It was midsummer. Paris was just like Greece: the

Madeleine full of Americans, the Champs Elysées deserted, burnt up and

inhabited by goats. There was a water famine. The Grand Prix had been

won by a Greek.

Lewis and Irene lived an Oriental life behind closed shutters. But they

were no longer on an island, and some of the warm, ribald charm of the

months gone by lingered in the empty streets, and when the tourists'

chars-à-bancs had disappeared there remained in the air something

eager, dexterous and precious, which Paris will always retain, even when

there are no more Frenchmen to live there.

They saw no one. Irene disliked people. She never spoke to them. "In

Paris," she said, "people always seem to be expecting you to surprise

them. I have nothing to give them. I only expect you, Lewis. So long as

I am alone with you I am happy. I like the lower classes, children and

animals: but here children always look ill, animals are ill-treated, and

the work-people are nothing but greedy snobs."

They spent the mornings in bed. Lewis had kept some of his racehorses.

He telephoned from his bed to Orne and Calvados to hear the latest about

their shoes, their teeth and their tendons. The days passed, each one

like the last. In the evening they emptied champagne bottles outside

Paris in cardboard mills with old-fashioned bar parlours; they had

foreign foods cooked at their table with so much brandy in the sauces

that they ate in the midst of flames.

"We are spending money recklessly," said Irene, "and we are making none.

We must think of that. Call me cheeseparing if you like."

"Bah!" answered Lewis. "It is bad enough not to have any money; but its

far worse to stint oneself when one has."

They never went into Society. Lewis' marriage had been received with

boisterous silence. He accepted the fact philosophically.

"Our union is far from being blessed; we cannot hope to please people.

Both on your side and mine a certain number of people were annoyed, but

the greater number were quite indifferent. Nothing is left but the

natural hostility evoked by the sight of a happy couple and which we

must get used to. If we ever want to see people again we have only to

suffer some of those misfortunes which make it possible for our friends

to breathe the same air as we do."

Idleness is the mother of all the vices, but vice is the father of all

the arts. They began to go to museums. The one Irene preferred was the

Naval Museum, because of the sailing ships. She had not the least

artistic sense. She was quite happy living amongst ugly things. Of our

art she only knew what the East knows: Ziem, Diaz, Meisonnier, Detaille.

Lewis, who had looked up the Peloponnesian wars before going to Greece,

wanted to explain French history to her. But he found that she knew the

dates of the births and deaths of all our kings. Irene's idea of France

was that rather faded, ridiculous and frail, but at the same time

accurate and pathetic, picture of her that is given in Levantine

schools. The only kind of food she liked was stuffed courgettes, pilaff

of tomatoes with Corinthian raisins and sweet wines. Lewis revealed to

her the secrets of French life, which are love and to have everything

cooked in butter.

They never left one another. They lived quite remote from the hours of

seven in the morning and seven in the evening, those iron blades which

cut short the sweetest of assignations in the intimacy of heated rooms.

In love, Irene, like all Eastern women, was very frugal and had the

simplest tastes. Lewis' large bed made her blush. She accepted his

caresses with alarm and gave none back. When Lewis surprised her in her

bath she put her hand to her mouth like a nymph surprised by a god.

"You can't imagine how you frightened me," she would say. And when he

approached she gave him the nape of her neck.

Lewis, from habit, tried to rally her to pleasure.

"In love you must not unchain everything that sleeps in a woman," she

objected. "Afterwards no one can control it. Think of the wizard's

apprentice in German stories."

Like all those to whom debauchery is an old friend, Lewis felt the

restraint of all this. It made Irene irresistible to him; there was so

much passion in her features and even some hint of savage tendencies.

And yet at every attempt he encountered nothing but prudery and a marble

coldness.

Lewis exerted his experience, his subtlety and a certain low cunning. At

first his results were all cut short. But he renewed his attempts. Where

he had found Irene astonished now she only hesitated. He obtained more

influence over her daily and he felt her yielding. At last he had to

admit to himself that, perhaps to please him only, she was progressing.

He did not hesitate to use her for his pleasure, without seeing that he

risked spoiling her or losing her.

"What exactly is meant by going on the loose?" asked Irene.

"How shall I put it? It is throwing paper serpentines about instead of

sleeping, taking drugs or one's pleasure where one finds it."

"What, exactly, do you mean by that?"

"Oh! nothing."

"I don't understand," said Irene, puzzled.

VI

LEWIS surprised Irene before her mirror.

"I'm getting fat," she said. "You are making a Turkish woman of me."

"Why worry about it?"

"I worry about everything. I am not a sceptic like you. I have a

terrible sense of my liabilities."

"Personally, I am a 'limited liability company,' and even then I am

pessimist enough not to accept any."

"That's very practical of you. You are a pessimist, Lewis, without

giving much thought to it, merely for the sake of convenience. One has

no worries if one can persuade oneself that this world means nothing.

You get annoyed because it doesn't amuse me to go to my dressmaker,

because I refuse the slavery of a rope of pearls, because my attention

wanders, so you say, when you talk to me about champagne vintages; it is

really because I am ashamed of profiting by all these things now that I

don't work. The more I reflect on it, the more convinced I am that the

world is one complete harmonious whole. The confusion in which we find

ourselves at present is only transient and it is wrong to add to it."

"You are a pessimistic optimist, and I am an optimistic pessimist,"

answered Lewis; "long ago I decided that we would get on as well as we

could, I and my pleasure; I intend to live and die in its company,

without bothering about other people."

"No, Lewis, it's no good being cunning. You can leave that to

tradespeople."

"Things always arrange themselves."

"Yes, but not always as we want them to."

"Then why work at all?"

"But that's just it: we don't, either of us. Do you think I did what I

used to do out of rapacity? I did it first of all from necessity, then

for my country, and lastly because, being on the earth, I have a feeling

that I belong to a human association, to an austere company formed for

production and economy."

"What a pity it is that one cannot take everything you say down in

writing!"

"Don't scoff. I cannot bear to take without giving, to be a luxury

article like other women, expensive yesterday, a nuisance to-day."

Lewis looked at her with satirical bewilderment. He was a true Parisian,

whose egoism and adaptability would survive any trial. Living forcefully

and carelessly in a post-war world where everything is barter and

speculation, he had never put questions of this sort to himself. He

thought it sufficient, in order not to be a parasite, to pay one's taxes

and to have been a soldier. He wondered at Irene. He felt she was a

victim of that perfect honesty, that "demon of honesty" of which the

ancients talk, which dominates the construction of all Greek buildings

and enables them to endure: her life, like antiquity, was imbued with

the idea of "the law" which she never lost sight of Lewis was

ingenuously surprised that anyone could have simple, old-fashioned ideas

without being vulgar. He imagined that elegance was the exclusive

privilege of corrupt natures. A prey to similar prejudices, we have seen

that he had obstinately thrown himself into a kind of Jansenism of

immorality. The presence of Irene ought to have pulled him out.

Unfortunately, long years of uncontrolled power, both over himself and

over others, prevented him from believing or obeying, just as they

prevented him from reforming; he made no changes in his mode of life. He

did not attempt to make Irene respect him, well knowing that one is

loved chiefly for one's faults. So it was that he went on wasting his

substance. But the material perfection and the method of life which he

had brought to such a high pitch before his marriage, began to fail him.

Childish longings and hereditary nerves began to reassert themselves. He

was leading an unhealthy life.

One evening, after dinner, Lewis yawned.

"The 'Côtes de Gaillon' races are to-morrow," he said. "Are you

coming?"

"Our life is perfectly absurd," was all Irene replied.

VII

IN the weeks that followed, Irene seemed to grow much more cheerful. She

went out every morning early and only came back in time for lunch. Her

mail became more imposing daily. She no longer complained of feeling ill

or of putting on weight. There were frequent telephone calls for her: a

foreign voice would say: "Can Madame come to the téléfon?" and a long

conversation would follow. Lewis, jealous of his own liberty, tried to

appear to respect that of Irene; he avoided questioning her. Was it

family business, or merely trifles, or love affairs? He hated to think

about it. He never stopped being "worried" about it (the word takes on

such a tragic meaning in the mouths of habitually indifferent people).

One morning Lewis noticed her car waiting in the Rue Cambon. He looked

for the name of some masseuse or dressmaker, thinking to find Irene

there; but no. A gloomy house, a sort of perpendicular steppe, with

church windows round a lift shaft wrapped in a winding staircase. What

could she be doing in there? And for so long, too? At half-past twelve

some electricians came in from their dinner hour. Lewis examined the

courtyard. The mezzanine floor seemed improper. There were pink curtains

on the fifth floor. He was ashamed of spying. He who scoffed at

presentiments found them everywhere.

Restless and ill at ease, he went on waiting, seated on the stairs. At

one o'clock Irene came out with a large envelope under her arm. She was

on her way home to lunch, five minutes late, like a man, not one of

those absurd latenesses of some women. When she saw him she stopped,

speechless. She got into her car (which she drove herself) but did not

start it. She turned towards him and there, in the middle of the street,

in that closed box, without any preamble, she explained herself:--

"Forgive me, Lewis ... I didn't dare tell you ... even though I couldn't

bear having secrets from you. I have only been coming here for a few

days ... yes, only a fortnight. Our Bank is opening a branch in Paris.

Two floors of this building. The name isn't even up yet. Electric light

is just being put in ... I swear to you that circumstances forced me

into it. I heard recently that a Greek combine was going to issue in

France a drachma loan in which we are interested. Our agent here is an

idiot. One day, finding himself in difficulties, he rang me up to ask my

advice. I cleared things up for him. The next day I went back to the

Bank, and since then I have been there every day."

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

yesterday, that headache ..."

"I never had a headache (if you only knew how nice it is not to have to

tell you any more fibs). I brought some accounts home and I shut myself

up in order to check them, without your knowledge."

Lewis said nothing for a moment, then he began to laugh:

"And I used to believe in drug cures!"

That evening, after dinner (rain outside, the first day of fires), Lewis

lit his pipe:

"I have been thinking over my adventure this morning.... It is more

serious than you think, Irene. The least amusing thing in this discovery

by a deceived husband is that you compel me, too, to go back to work. I

don't want to in the least; but I really cannot play the Oriental who

lounges in a café whilst his wife works in the fields, or, as they say

in select Apache circles in the Rue d'Alésia: to let her go down to

_business_."

"It is only for a fortnight more ..."

"It is for your whole life, Irene. You will never give up working; you'd

die if you did. Don't you see that you're a different woman since you

have gone back to that Bank?"

Irene came and sat on the floor beside him.

"It's true. I regret it less than you think. It will be good for you to

work, too.... You see you must do something useful. There cannot be two

Europes, one living cleanly and well, and the other sleeping amongst

lice and eating bark."

"I seem to have married a copy of the 'Civil Progress.'"

"Be generous. Don't wait until events prove to us that people must love

each other. That sort of lesson costs too much."

In the dusk she scanned Lewis' energetic features which had begun to

fill out and to lose their character since he had given up working.

"I have been telling myself that you, too, probably wanted to get your

firm back into your own hands, but didn't like to suggest it because of

me."

Lewis hastened to be insincere.

"Not at all. I was quite determined never to touch business again. Is

there anything you have not lulled to sleep in me?"

"I am anxious about you. What happens nowadays to those passions, those

risks, all those forceful lines that once crossed your life? Are they

all sleeping, to be stirred up one day against me?"

"Don't be frightened. I soon forget."

"Do you remember? You used to call the Bourse your playground."

"I've grown a lot since then. I no longer require to play."

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

our marriage?"

Lewis turned the handle of the radiator tap--an act which corresponds to

the old-fashioned poking of the fire.

" ... No," he answered.

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

leant over Irene.

"Well, let's see ... that is to say ... once, in Greece ... I don't

think I ever told you ... I bought and sold the whole raisin crop of

your island on margin."

VIII

SHORTLY afterwards the head office of the Apostolatos Bank in France was

transferred from Marseilles to Paris. Irene accepted the appointment of

general manager. The Greek firm was gradually giving up freighting and

mercantile advances, and concentrating on big industrial undertakings

and international finance. Thanks to this alteration of policy and to

the amount of foreign capital they managed to attract, the shares of

their affiliated companies, the "Olympic Chemical Produce Company" and

the "Spartan Electricity Corporation" (for exploiting Thomson Houston

systems in Peloponnesia), had doubled in value in a few months. The name

of Apostolatos was, besides, "highly esteemed" in Paris, and the

prize-bond drachma loan began to find its way on to the French market.

There was only one shadow over all this prosperity, namely a strain in

Græco-Italian relations arising from the seizure of a Greek steamship

in the Adriatic, and which was in danger of having unpleasant results.

At the Franco-African Bank the situation was quite different. Lewis

found it difficult to retrieve his position there. He had left the house

in great disorder. That he might run it without any control, like a

proud master, he had been careful, during his years of management, never

to keep anyone else informed of what was going on, to depute nothing, to

classify no papers, carrying through deals without leaving any trace of

them in writing, taking the files that interested him home and not

bringing them back; as soon as he left, the bold undertakings which he

only kept going by his enthusiasm or his daring, began to totter. People

did not hesitate to discredit him. His strokes of luck became errors,

his impetuosity sheer madness. When he came back the spirit of the

management had changed. A whole hierarchy of unenterprising managers and

timid patriarchs had got back the upper hand and took a mean outlook on

things, treating them administratively without provision for the future,

feebly and apathetically. Lewis wandered amongst them like a wild beast

amongst a herd of cattle. He had to employ all his recovered violence to

reimpose himself on them.

Work came back like a true friend: Irene put the finishing touches to

his prosperity. Lewis reasserted himself and they were convinced that

they would soon be as perfectly united in their work as they were in

their love.

Different interests, earlier rising, hurried meals, these would all make

the hours spent together more precious. Their pleasures would become

escapades; their petty worries would gradually disappear. Profit taking

interrupted their tender glances, urgent clearances distracted them from

the ardour which united them. The striving after perfection which wrecks

even the most wonderful love would be diverted into other channels. All

the marvels of business existence, its dangers, the hazards of new

financial ventures, the unsettled state of foreign exchanges, the pathos

of liquidations and carrying over, must establish a greater sense of

quiet, abundance, and permanence between them than the most intimate and

temperate life ever could accomplish.

But it was not so. These two beings who had such abundant and such

natural reasons for loving one another, saw their happiness fade day by

day. Lewis was both the cause and the first victim of this, for he had

nothing like Irene's strength of character.

It often happened that one of them opened letters meant for the other.

Irene apologised on reading the first line. But Lewis could not resist

reading on to the end, even after seeing that it was an Apostolatos

letter.

Irene worked without any help, transacting business in her mind whilst

dressing herself; Lewis could not do without a secretary, and the head

of Martial reappeared against the daily background.

Like a good many business men, Lewis knew no arithmetic, and was lost

like a child in the rule of three.

Irene made fun of him:

"You will finish like my uncle Priam," she said. "One evening he

balanced his accounts and discovered an enormous deficit, so he blew his

brains out. The next day they found he had made a mistake in his

calculations. He left my aunt Clytemnestra six million francs."

The telephone bell rang. Lewis unhooked the receiver with an

expressionless face, but his eyes hardened.

"It's for you, darling," he said.

He took umbrage at Irene's professional skill. He asked himself how she

could be so self-sufficient. She was never late, and she received

visits, drew up memoranda, answered letters and dictated reports without

any apparent effort. Irene's office was always tidy, everything being

cleared up at the end of each morning. Lewis' office was crammed with

invoices and with memoranda vainly waiting for an answer. Irene was

extremely generous in all her dealings ("Always give people plenty of

rope," she said), especially when it was a question of dealing with

Greeks. One felt that between Greeks there immediately arose a sort of

understanding and that certain kinds of treachery were impossible.

Lewis, on the other hand, had to travel alone, sword in hand, his eyes

wide open, always on the alert in that atmosphere of western finance

where bad faith predominates.

Irene came from a long line of goldsmith bankers who dealt in actual

bullion. Lewis belonged to a generation which believes only in

industrial undertakings, and has never even seen gold, and he despised

deposit banks and deposits themselves which, however, he had no scruples

about re-investing as he thought fit, if necessary even against the

wishes of his customers. Irene followed tradition, considered thrift as

being almost holy, had great respect for debentures and Government

securities, and took the trouble to buy Members of Parliament and the

Press; "... to be a banker," she said, "is to observe a thousand strict

laws and never to act rashly."

Lewis, with feudal post-war pride, revolted from these slow methods: he

was wrong. The union of politics and finance produce ugly children, but

hardy ones.

"Irene," he used to say, "you represent monopolies and extortion."

"And you," she retorted, "stock jobbing and speculation."

Sometimes Lewis refused a transaction which it bored him to carry

through. In this respect he was like a woman. Irene left nothing to

chance; everything was grist that came to her mill. She did not forget

that modern credit is the granddaughter of usury. She made use of other

people's leavings. She took care not to trespass on Lewis' territory

(similar enterprizes in the Mediterranean often caused their interests

to overlap). But if Lewis handed her over a deal to see what she would

do with it, Irene applied herself to it and favourable results soon

appeared. Then Lewis regretted it. Although he proudly concealed the

fact, Irene saw through him and in her frank way offered not to go on

with it. But he, sulkily, would not learn his lesson; he found it

difficult to forgive.

Certainly the admiration he had for Irene never abated; but sometimes he

had bitter thoughts about her.

He reproached himself for them; but the images he tried to banish from

his mind merely returned with greater frequency.

One morning Lewis said to Irene:

"I shan't be in to-day. I've got a business lunch on."

He was on the point of telling her all about it, and to explain to her

that it was a question of examining some very attractive offers from an

American combine with a view to establishing wireless communication with

Asia Minor and even Persia. But, perhaps in order to intrigue

Irene--believing her to be as jealous as he was--perhaps, even though

she was discretion itself, in order that no word of the matter should

leak out, he said nothing.

That evening, seized with remorse, he took up the tale where he had left

it in the morning.

"I hadn't time to explain. I invited two American bankers to luncheon.

They have just come from London ..."

"Isn't it about the wireless in Asia Minor?" interrupted Irene. "Be very

careful; your people have not, as they pretend, got the Marconi Company

behind them. They came to me with it a week ago and I made some

inquiries. It is not a serious proposition."

In less time than one could imagine the intercourse between them began

to lose sincerity. On Irene's side it was because she felt that her

husband was drifting away from her. On Lewis' side it was because at

every turn he found her to be his master. He had the impression of

continuing a struggle against an intimate and skilful adversary who had

made him bite the dust at their first encounter. That enterprise of the

San Lucido mines which had brought them together by separating them, and

of which a few months earlier Lewis could not think without emotion

because it had been the origin of his happiness, now humiliated him as

it prospered more and more: he found himself loathing it when he read

that it was entering on its second financial year, that the profits had

been most satisfactory and that there was quite a possibility of a

dividend being declared.

He remembered on that occasion that it was the anniversary of their

meeting in Sicily. He promised himself that he would take Irene some of

the pungent and intoxicating jasmin of that first evening.

IX

THE afternoon on which Lewis went to his florist to order the jasmin,

chance, our worst enemy, brought Madame Magnac there, too. One cannot

live in the closest intimacy with anyone for several years without

acquiring a certain number of tradesmen in common. Elsie! In a flash she

became again the plenipotentiary of pleasure, the woman at the same time

stately and ludicrous, as elegant and up to date as ever; and everything

else that Lewis wanted Irene to be, and which she was not. He stopped

thinking that a legal wife is sufficient to console a man for all his

mistresses. He felt that Elsie had become necessary to him again.

Between them there was no question of quarreling, of separation, of

points of honour or of equity. With the true spirit of worldliness and

tact, Madame Magnac spoke to him as though she were continuing a

conversation interrupted by chance the day before.

"Above all, don't come at the apéritif hour if it bores you, though

you'll always be most welcome.... News? Marbot is in bed with his

hind-quarters full of buck shot. Harbedjan put them into him a fortnight

ago at Sologne. If the Armenians start massacring ..."

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

jasmin anywhere.

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

lettuce if you like ..."

Lewis had been at Madame Magnac's for an hour, stretched on a divan; she

went on, sitting by him, in the same airy tone of voice:

"Everyone says you've got a charming wife, Lewis; like a Ravenna

mosaic.... So you want me to be the last person to know her? I am sure I

shall like her very much."

"That's too much already."

"Come, Lewis.... Besides it appears that she is a marvellous business

man. Do let me know her."

"Later on."

She murmured close to his ear, laughing:--

"After all, perhaps it would be an easy way to fix things up?"

X

LEWIS left Madame Magnac and went home on foot to disperse various

scents which seem to have soaked into his skin. He was very late for

dinner. Irene was stretched out in front of the fire, her head in her

hands. Lewis thought she was crying, and took hold of her fingers. No,

Irene never shed tears, but she was obviously forcing down her sorrow.

"When I come in," said Lewis, with infantile ferocity, "I like you to be

pleasant. You're about as jolly as a dishonoured cheque. What is the

matter?"

"I've been alone a long time this evening, and I know now that I was

wrong to go back to business. Now it's too late to retrace my steps. It

isn't a game which one is free to take up and drop again at will.

Laziness is an accomplishment which only makes one more frivolous. Work

is a hard law with serious consequences which I am only just beginning

to realize...."

Lewis made a movement of impatience to avoid a sermon.

"Everything that happens is my fault," continued Irene, "even to have

agreed to marry was wrong of me; and yet people say I am stubborn! I had

an idea that ... I want to explain something to you which you daren't

admit to me: that you married to be happy and quiet, not for your house

to be turned into a bank, a counting-house; what did I say? Two Banks.

To-day I am your competitor, and to-morrow? Perhaps in marrying me you

were only seeking revenge, and having got it, you only asked to live in

peace; in your heart, Lewis, you care for me much less than you think.

Unfortunately, it's I who love you now ... (she stopped him

interrupting), but that is my own affair. Give up work? You have seen me

try, I can't go on doing nothing. I am a Greek, and for me every dream,

every thought, must materialize. My ancestors of the Islands lived for

centuries in the midst of carnage and outlawry on that very island on

which you could not live. I, too, am an island, something very primitive

and remote, and you cannot live there either. I hate everything which is

merely amusing or childish. Vice, whether it be splendid or convenient,

does not attract me. I have behind me centuries of trade, of liberty, of

emigration.... Let me go away in my turn ..."

Lewis took hold of Irene's hair, fine as magneto wires.

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

friends, Irene?"

"No, not friends. I haven't time to wait for the affections of old age.

Don't make any mistake. You are not a Russian to stagger across the flow

of your feelings, crying out: 'Everything I touch crumbles.' Don't turn

your back on the truth. The motto of humanity should be: 'Behold the

truth, now everyone for himself!' The Greeks are the only exception.

What are we, we two? During the day we are enemies. During the

night ... yes, during the night also, but there we cannot choose our

weapons. We can't go on like that. It will become too much of a strain. The

path we are following is strewn with unhappiness! You with your character:

civilized, nervous, often unreliable; and I with mine, full of savage

instincts, passionate ..."

Lewis did not reply. This child was very dear to him at heart. He took

her in his arms and passed his hand between her dress and her body.

"Irene, your name does mean Peace, doesn't it?"

Irene remained powerless, her head on Lewis' knees, like a little Greek

city intoxicated by its tyrant.

XI

THUS Lewis realized that Irene, with all her pride, could not resist

him. He thought "They say that modern women cannot find men; they will

always find plenty to make love to them, but what they won't find is the

man who has time to sit beside them and put his arm round them and say:

'Why are you unhappy?'"

What puzzled him was that this melancholy conversation, with its hint of

rebellion, should have occurred at the very moment when he first began

to drift away from her. When we live in close intimacy with anyone,

something more subtle than conscience tells us about him, and our

actions, when they appear to us most inexplicable are often the result

of a mysterious logic.

Irene and Lewis took up their life together again, but a strong barrier

was growing up between them without their knowledge.

Irene never tried to check her thoughts:

"I don't think we shall ever succeed in being happy."

Lewis became exasperated:

"If I were as frank as you are we would have stopped being happy long

ago; of course we'll be happy, we must be."

Then he took her hands in his and comforted her.

"Be patient. Don't live on the precious capital of your nerves. Life

would be intolerable without sorrow. Would you like me to take you into

Society? There are all kinds of quite new things to do there, all sorts

of amusing or gorgeous sights which you have always refused to have

anything to do with. People in the mass are a bore, but taken

individually this is not so true. You are certainly not 'sociable,' as

old ladies say; but there is no necessity for you to see old ladies.

Won't you try a little pleasure?"

It struck Lewis with satisfaction, but not without resentment, that he

had never taken such trouble with a woman. That is to say, he paid her

those little attentions which are really only parlour tricks, and which

he mistook for the impulses of his heart.

They went to dark houses on the left bank of the river, light houses on

the right bank, hotels, theatres, concerts. They went away from balls at

an hour when in the deserted streets the footmen shout out names famous

in the history of France. For the first time since their marriage Lewis

and Irene went the rounds of polite society in the autumn season.

Irene was a great success. Paris did not lack business women, but they

were all clever dressmakers, lucky actresses, shrewd concierges,

publicity agents; they all worked clumsily, with no more originality

than a cook making jam, their only aim being to make money, to be

received in Society, and to entertain well-known men, thus showing the

limitations of their ambitions.

Irene pleased people by her charm, her disregard of the technique of

finance, her straightforward methods, her simple and imperious

character. She was sought out by everyone; Lewis was never jealous.

Important people asked to be introduced to her. Amongst them the Italian

Chargé d'Affaires, who was fond of pretty women, but who immediately

regretted it because it was on the eve of the Græco-Italian conflict,

and Irene turned her back on him.

Irene was not affected by her success. What she really liked was to stay

at home and to entertain a few intimate Greek friends. When Lewis came

home he would hear a guttural conversation punctuated by twitterings

coming from the drawing-room; a committee meeting of a Philhellenic

benevolent society. He could not understand a word, his recollection of

Greek roots being quite useless. Olympus made a noise like a duck-pond.

He would fly after catching sight of four or five people amongst whom

was aunt Clytemnestra, all very dark and very rich, with blue eyebrows,

eyes like chocolate caramels and emeralds the size of paving stones or

diamonds like heaps of pounded ice on their fingers.

He would shut himself in his study, put his feet up on his table and

think of Irene, wondering how he could give her proofs of his affection

and at the same time get even with her.

XII

OFFICIAL QUOTATIONS

Dividends. Previous Name of Opening Closing

Closing. Security. Price. Price.

70 1,065 Apostolatos 1,080 1,106

Bank

540 Franco-African 535 510

Bank

XIII

THREE weeks after issue the Greek loan had been doubly subscribed at the

offices of the Apostolatos Bank alone. One evening Irene and Lewis

decided to celebrate this success and to emerge from their solitude.

There were no half-measures in their celebration.

Irene wore a silver tissue dress which contrasted with her face,

deepening the warmth of her Oriental complexion: she was black and

silver like the ikons of her country.

"How perfect she is," thought Lewis, going to fetch her in her room, and

looking at her lithely curving body beneath the clinging dress.

They dined, too well, in the midst of dancing, rounded shoulders, and

machine-like dinner jackets. Irene compared these stars from the Rue de

la Paix, the laughter and the surfeit of make-up, with Trieste in the

evening, with its two cinemas and the officers wrapped in their capes

stalking up and down before the Café du Veneto. The whole evening they

wandered from one cabaret to another, from the Rue Caumartin to

Montmartre. Up there Lewis met some friends.

Whilst a dancer, caught in a bundle of limelight rays, was carrying his

partner off round his neck like a deer, Irene found herself being

introduced to a handsome, self-possessed, slightly faded woman with a

geranium-coloured mouth and sly eyes, who immediately took an interest

in her.

At the first opportunity she asked Lewis her name.

"Why, it's Elsie Magnac."

Lewis had often spoken of her. Without ever having met her Irene had

taken a dislike to her.

"I don't even like to think of her being alive," she told Lewis one day.

What wrong opinions one can form of people! Elsie Magnac was charming.

They became friends at once. She joined their party. They danced and

drank together.

Towards one o'clock they found themselves, all three, on the Place

Pigalle. The open air smote them. The carriages were half asleep; the

luminous signs were becoming lethargic.

"I will drive you home," said Madame Magnac.

The car slid down the slopes of Montmartre, whitened by the snows of

cocaine, through the streets lit up like a harbour in that feast of

electricity punctuated by the spasmodic nervous jerkings of sky signs.

Russian cabarets faced Argentine ranches, Moorish cafés and Brazilian

dives stood opposite Caucasian cellars and Chinese restaurants.

Occasionally, overwhelmed by this cosmopolitan glut, a gaunt scared

Frenchman stole along.

Irene was seated between Madame Magnac and Lewis. She was conscious of

them looking at each other behind her back, and uttering soundless words

to each other. When Madame Magnac left them they went up to their rooms.

Irene faltered and almost collapsed. She felt herself spinning like a

Dervish: Lewis seemed to be all round her. She no longer had the

strength to resist some force, some sequence of events which followed

each other inevitably. She wanted to say to her husband: "Don't leave

me, I feel so ill at ease, so wretched this evening." But he seemed so

overwrought, so anxious to leave her that her courage failed her.

With a soft grace and supreme awkwardness she threw herself at his

knees:

"I hate that woman! Swear that you will never see Madame Magnac again!"

Lewis reassured her with feline callousness.

"Of course not, if you don't want me to."

She threw her arms passionately round him.

"Now you must go to sleep," he said.

He went out. Irene felt stifled. She opened the window. The night was

green and bitter as an apple. The street shone emptily. Only a red light

glowed like some mysterious fire grate: the rear lamp of a car. With a

feeling of uneasiness Irene went back into her room, put out the light

and leant on the window sill once more.

A few moments later the house door opened and a man came out. There was

no doubt about it; it was Lewis. He went towards the car standing a

little way down the street. Then he stopped and looked up. Reassured, he

opened the door of the car. Beneath the electric street lamp Irene saw

Madame Magnac's hand, limp and white, as if it had Been severed. The car

drove away.

XIV

"HAVEN'T you ever played tricks on those you love," thought Lewis,

answering an imaginary antagonist, as he walked along the quais by

himself. The night, deep as coffee grounds in which he could foretell no

future, was over. He had spent it with Madame Magnac, as in the old

days. Now he was on his way back to Irene for breakfast. What he liked

about Irene was her purity; he had adored that purity for so long that

he could not bear it any more. Indeed it protected Irene, unfairly he

thought, from everything; it protected her from suspicion, from danger;

it enabled her to remain herself; never to make an effort to serve him

or to understand him; she went to bed completely enveloped in this

carapace.... To go on living in Paris after the age of thirty one must

accept being surrounded by complicity. Otherwise one must leave. Since

Irene had agreed to come back to France, she must sooner or later get

used to it.

Lewis used to think that the peccadillos which seemed to him necessary

with women who only attracted him physically, would automatically cease

if he ever really fell in love. He had counted without that eagerness to

surpass ourselves which dominates us and which is perhaps nothing but

habit disguised.

No, he was not complicating his life, he was simplifying it.

XV

HE was simplifying it more than he imagined, for when he got home he

found the house empty. He waited for two days. Then seized with a

remorse and despair of which he would not have been thought capable, in

forty-two hours he scoured Paris, London and Trieste. But without

result. There was not the slightest trace of Irene.

On the eighth day he received a telegram from her asking him to come and

join her at Corfu.

Would she forgive him? No pilgrimage would have been too long for him if

she would relieve him of his misery. With some difficulty, the relations

between Italy and Greece still being strained, he obtained a permit, and

after further efforts he succeeded in getting on board an Italian vessel

at Brindisi, laden with troops.

The next day at sundown Corfu appeared, set in the swelling sea. In the

leaden channel they dipped their ensign to _Count Cavour_, _Julius

Cæsar_, _Saint Mark_, _Leopardi_ and all kinds of Italian celebrities

painted iron-grey, armed with naked guns trained on the old citadel

protected by its interlacing vines. The principal buildings sought

shelter under the white flag. The whole town was peacefully doing its

laundry. The Italians had just declared a blockade against the island.

At the Hôtel de la Belle Venise, Lewis heard that the Greek ships with

their passengers were confined to the south, in the Khalkiopoulo Bay. He

went there at sunset.

It was raining. Confusedly, in the westerly wind, the Greek destroyers

with their financiers' names and their metal masts through the lattice

work of which the sky shone like new wine, jostled transport ships,

cargo boats from Patras, unable to proceed on their journeys, and even

feluccas laden with flour and asphalt stopped in their island coast

trade and guarded by searchlights from Italian hydroplanes.

Like a belated sailor returning to his ship, Lewis, in a boat rowed by

two men on the bilious sea, was looking with the aid of a pocket lamp

for the _Basileus II_, on board which Irene was. In the darkness he

strayed amongst screw-blades, beneath the stiff figure-heads and amongst

the anchor cables; one heard concertinas, forecastle songs, the creaking

of masts and the barking of dogs on the sailing ships. A trimmer emptied

a scuttle of clinkers almost on top of him. Idle passengers, to relieve

the boredom of quarantine, gazed at him over their black bulwarks and

cursed him in Greek.

At last a searchlight swung the night round and the word _Basileus II_

appeared on a poop in letters of gold.

XVI

HE found her in her cabin. A bunk with a wooden frame, a screwed-up

porthole, washing soaking in the basin, open trunks. A fan churned the

exhausted air. He faltered:

"Irene!"

"Don't touch me!"

"But you sent for me ..."

"I know.... Don't let's waste time. I have something important to say to

you. Come on to the upper deck."

On the upper deck they had difficulty in keeping their feet for the wind

seemed to seize them by main force; the ship was straining at her

anchors. In the distance an intermittent flash of red alternating with

green. Above them the lifeboats hanging like black airships in the empty

sky, lit up for one moment by stars; round the ship the sea was making a

noise like nuts rolling about.

"Why are you here?"

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

to Athens ..."

"To escape?"

"Of course."

"Irene, do forgive me."

"Don't you understand that I am no longer your wife? I didn't ask you to

come here on this January night merely to tell you that that account

between us is closed for ever. Once again, don't let's waste time. Here

are some telegrams from Trieste. They confirm information we have

received during the last few days. You are aware of the political

situation. You know that the Italians have been disappointed in their

demand for an indemnity against us. To-day they are having their

revenge. It is just like them. They are going to put an embargo on all

Greek property in Italy. We shall be compelled to sell San Lucido just

at the moment when it is doing well. After all, that is what the Italian

Government cannot forgive us. We bought the mine at a period when Italy

was half Communist, the victim of a depreciated currency. To-day we are

facing a Nationalist Italy, foreigner-hating, intoxicated with her

'Rights.' The _Credito Milanese_ with whom we are in close touch, and of

whose Fascist leanings you know, has been making proposals in which

their threats are ill-concealed, to buy us out."

"Cannot you arrange a fictitious transfer of stock and administration by

a third party until the crisis has passed?" asked Lewis.

"No, what they want is that the undertaking should no longer be in Greek

hands. It is a policy which they are extending to the whole of the

Eastern Mediterranean. We have no choice. Read the telegrams; we must

sell immediately at the best price we can."

"What conditions does the _Credito Milanese_ offer you?"

"They are not too good. But at any rate they are the best we can get.

But, you understand, we will never sell to Italians. To come to the

point. What I propose is this: are you disposed to take it over again?"

"What a shifting venture ..." thought Lewis.

This San Lucido enterprise had come and gone in his life during the past

year like an absurd romantic refrain. He saw again the glittering sea

and a young woman sounding with brown arms. He saw again the pure

profile of the Sicilian hills and the shimmering blue sky. A cry burst

from him, the first in his life:

"Irene! don't leave me!"

"Come. You heard what I said. Think it over. Let your words be measured

by the thought that this is our last conversation. Make your

calculations. That is what you are here for. It was much more difficult

for me to ask you to come ..."

"You needn't go on. I have already had proof of your pride."

Irene in her turn felt herself weakening under the bitterness of their

words. But she controlled herself.

"Let us try to keep the balance between insolence and affliction, if you

don't mind?"

Softer thoughts passed between them after this.

"Here we are," she went on, "back in life as single combatants. Let us

play our parts. Let us fight a good battle."

"Irene, I lo ..."

"You must stop before you utter that word, which would make the heavens

fall on us. Love is not made for you or for me. For a moment I allowed

myself to be on this earth for something else than to labour: my

punishment was bound to come. Do you want the mine, yes or no? Answer

me."

"I shall have to think it over," said Lewis. "In any case we could not

take over the shares diluted last June except at par. As to profits

carried into the reserve, I am afraid these cannot be taken into

account..."

And he broke down, sobbing.

An oily moon came out of the clouds and appeared through the rigging.

"Sorrow does not confuse his mind," thought Irene. "His conditions are

even harder than those of the Italians."

XVII

THE Apostolatos Bank sold the San Lucido mines. The Franco-African

bought them at the lowest possible price, with the tacit consent of the

Italian Government (with whom, by the way, they concluded an important

financial pact in Asia Minor). During the whole time the negotiations

were going on, and they were long, only an impersonal correspondence

passed between the two houses; but Irene first, and then Lewis, drafted

and signed for each other various notes and memoranda which kept them

constantly in communication. As these conversations carried on from a

distance became gradually more steady, carried on without jarring note

or passion, their views on business policy in the Mediterranean were

soon found to be identical in many particulars. Their interests began to

coincide. The results were profitable, just as though Fate, which had

done its utmost to separate them and to prevent them from being happy,

was eager to give her blessing to this financial union and to make their

fortunes as soon as they consented to give themselves only to an

ordinary life. Fickle fortune ministered to them. They sometimes

wondered why they had not always worked together; all their constraint

fell from them and they went so far as to admit that if they had been

destined to love perfectly they would probably at the moment be standing

amongst the ruins of their fortunes. For Love never hesitates to ruin

the lives of those who do not want him.

Since Corfu, Lewis and Irene have never seen one another, but they write

to each other every day.

XVIII

GOSSIP FROM THE BOURSE

_Everyone knows that there has for some time been talk of a fusion

between the Apostolatos Bank of Trieste and the great French firm, the

Franco-African Bank; we think we may safely say that this will soon be

an accomplished fact. The new combine will take the title of_

MEDITERRANEAN CONSOLIDATED. _In the course of the Extraordinary General

Meeting, which is to take place next month, it will be suggested, if our

information is correct, that the shareholders shall be entitled to

receive one new share for two old ones, and one new share for four old

ones, of the Apostolatos Bank and the Franco-African, respectively.

Shortly after these come on the market, which will be about January, we

are confident that the shares of the new combine will be quoted so

favourably that they will be sought after as gilt-edged securities._

(_Financial Information._)