The Project Gutenberg eBook ofLewis and IreneThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Lewis and IreneAuthor: Paul MorandTranslator: Vyvyan Beresford HollandRelease date: June 26, 2023 [eBook #71047]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus, 1925Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEWIS AND IRENE ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Lewis and IreneAuthor: Paul MorandTranslator: Vyvyan Beresford HollandRelease date: June 26, 2023 [eBook #71047]Language: EnglishOriginal publication: United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus, 1925Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
Title: Lewis and Irene
Author: Paul MorandTranslator: Vyvyan Beresford Holland
Author: Paul Morand
Translator: Vyvyan Beresford Holland
Release date: June 26, 2023 [eBook #71047]
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Chatto & Windus, 1925
Credits: Laura Natal Rodrigues (Images generously made available by Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEWIS AND IRENE ***
A NOVEL BYPAUL MORAND
Translated byH. B. V.
CHATTO & WINDUSLONDON1925
By the same Author
OPEN ALL NIGHTCLOSED ALL NIGHTGuy Chapman: London
PART ONECHAPTERICHAPTERIICHAPTERIIICHAPTERIVCHAPTERVCHAPTERVICHAPTERVIICHAPTERVIIICHAPTERIXCHAPTERXCHAPTERXIPART TWOCHAPTERICHAPTERIICHAPTERIIICHAPTERIVCHAPTERVCHAPTERVICHAPTERVIICHAPTERVIIICHAPTERIXCHAPTERXCHAPTERXICHAPTERXIICHAPTERXIIICHAPTERXIVCHAPTERXVPART THREECHAPTERICHAPTERIICHAPTERIIICHAPTERIVCHAPTERVCHAPTERVICHAPTERVIICHAPTERVIIICHAPTERIXCHAPTERXCHAPTERXICHAPTERXIICHAPTERXIIICHAPTERXIVCHAPTERXVCHAPTERXVICHAPTERXVIICHAPTERXVIII
"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).
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 theNègreclock 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."
"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.
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'sHindu Love Songson 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. Whatisamusing 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."
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.
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.
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 cosmoimpolitan," 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.
"Ma présentation, en cette tenue de maraudeur aquatique, je la peux tenter, avec l'excuse du hasard."(S. MALLARMÉ,Le Nénuphar blanc.)
"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 theMattinofolded 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. TheMattinoon 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.
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."
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: