I met a mermaid swimming in the sea.And the taste of seaweed lingers in my mouth.
I met a mermaid swimming in the sea.And the taste of seaweed lingers in my mouth.
I met a mermaid swimming in the sea.And the taste of seaweed lingers in my mouth.
He suddenly realized with a pang of regret that this evening no one was waiting for him anywhere. He thought of Madame Magnac in Paris. The pleasant life he led seemed to him from this distance to be full of privations. He pictured his existence as having been terribly hard hitherto; a womanless childhood and an orphaned youth; he began to pity himself. He hoped that happier days were in store for him. He decided to make more friends; he managed his life extremely well and had always kept away from big dinner parties, definite office hours, servant troubles, professional conversationalists, marriage, scenes with mistresses and all other things that might prey upon his liberty, the luxury tax of snobbishness, the money troubles of his friends, children, the disdain of the haughty, the envy of his inferiors, in fact everything that spoils our daily life. But all this was negative and unsatisfying.
Night began to fall, accompanied by music coming from no one knew where; a shutter banged against a wall, rattling like a skeleton; the ancient clocks beat out one by one the dangerous weapons of the iron hours.
Above the village street the mountain still thrust up its dusky hump, bearing, without flinching, the weight of the older quarters of the town, placed so high that the topmost windows touched the lowest stars.
A WAITER came through the blue-distempered glass doors of the restaurant and familiarly handed Lewis a visiting card between his fingers (the summer service of the hotel).
Banque Apostolatos
Trieste.
Someone was asking to see him. He was just about to say that he was not in when he changed his mind.
It was she.
"I come to see you as a neighbour. I am in the annexe."
Lewis greeted her, congratulating himself on the unexpectedness of the thing. Then he said suddenly in a formal voice:
"What have you got to do with the Apostolatos Bank?"
She replied, composedly, that her name was Apostolatos, Irene Apostolatos, that the Apostolatoses of Trieste were her first cousins and that they managed the bank between the three of them. The London Apostolatoses were her uncles; the New York Apostolatoses (who had married, one, a Lazarides of Marseilles, and the other a Damaschino of Alexandria) were her great uncles. In fact, they all belonged to the same family and came originally from the Greek Islands.
"What is the Apostolatos Bank doing here?" asked Lewis, as though he were unaware of the patient efforts of the Greek banking group to lay hands on the mineral products of the Mediterranean. He well knew the reputation for greed and stability held by this old house, which dated from the Greek Independence.
"Didn't Pastafina tell you that we held an option on the San Lucido deposits after the expiry of yours? I was alone at Trieste when they put it up to us, eight days ago. It interested me deeply; one of my cousins was at Vichy, the other in Constantinople; I took a fast Lloyd boat going to Malta and came on here."
"But now that I have signed?"
"I go back to-morrow; so there's no time to be lost. I came to see you, monsieur, to propose to buy you out. What do you want for the deposits?"
Lewis could not see her properly as she stood there in the light of a garden lamp round which the butterflies were hovering and casting flickering shadows on her face. Her dress was of that stiff yellow muslin which is put round chandeliers to keep away the flies. Lewis smiled as he thought of the lovely soft dresses which Welsm was producing that year in Paris. Nevertheless, as she stood there before him, her legs slightly apart, her stomach forward, her figure erect, she looked like a figure of "Victory."
"Do you mind if I put out the light? It attracts the mosquitoes," he said.
Suddenly they found themselves in the gloom, just a man and a woman on whose races the uncertain light traced latticed patterns. The scenery had changed just as much as they had. The mountain spurs projected violently out of the darkness, leaving the ravines which separated them still plunged in it. In the square in front of the church, and lower down in the Giardini, the town bands (it being Thursday) were playing two different airs from the same Verdi opera. A diadem of acetylene flares at the prows of the fishing boats quivered on the sea. Now and then one of the beams was broken by a flash of darkness; a fisherman's arm brandishing a harpoon.
They seemed to be suspended between the dark masses of the sky and of the earth, in a double lighting, one a geometrical light along the pavements, and the other an irregular poetic light in the sky.
She went on:—
"The Franco-African Bank cannot develop deposits like those of San Lucido, which require the very latest machinery plant and highly technical advisors. You will be compelled either to sell out or to float a new company. Perhaps you have already decided to do this? I know that if you don't it won't be for want of capital, but still.... Would you like to share? To come to an agreement or, as we say in Greek, a 'symphony.' Would you let us subscribe thirty per cent, of the capital, but with shares carrying plural votes? You will always be wanting lire here, and Trieste is a place whose co-operation is not to be despised."
"Especially as the Italian exchange brokerage is particularly in your favour, being supported by the purchaser to the extent of one-quarter per cent.
"We are not Italians, monsieur," she replied with dignity, "but Greeks, and our brokerage is the English brokerage."
Lewis looked at her standing there in a kind of phosphorescence. He thought, until he saw her smile, that nothing could be brighter than her face; a big Grecian face with strong lines, like the too modern cameos in the shops of the Vomero. A straight, honest mouth, a mouth made for truth. Eyes whose gaze one could not imagine having to be lowered, and which were steadier and saw further than the eyes of women. Black hair plastered down like that of her Tanagra sisters. And for all that a certain eighteen thirty romanticism about her forehead....
"At any rate," she went on insistently, "would you be willing to dispose of a part of your concessions to us? We would be able to bring you co-operation of the very finest kind in exchange."
She spoke with a precision which contradicted all that is said about the music of words and all that is known of language; an incomparably pure French, that is to say, a perfect use of idiom, courteous, clearly articulated and rich in metallic nasal sounds, without the least foreign accent, without any of those slipshod constructions, fashionable clippings and slovenliness of everyday speech. Powerful without being violent, and full of dignity.
Whilst she was talking Lewis kept asking himself whether he would ever be able to put to her those questions which he was accustomed to put to women with that familiar and chaffing air of authority which he found so successful. But he felt that she would either not reply or would tell him the honest truth (is there any other kind?), and he dared not risk it.
For the first time he had the impression of having before him a person who was completely confident, and that any opinion she might issue was fully guaranteed.
Nevertheless, in the darkness her voice became warmer, softened a little, and betrayed a certain wilfulness.
Lewis then realized that he had not heard a word she had said, and had only been listening to the sound of her voice; he had to give her some reply.
The jasmin suddenly made its double perfume felt.
"I am very sorry, madame," he said, "but everything you suggest is impossible. We have decided to develop the property ourselves."
LEWIS never woke in the morning with the heavy eyelids of Burgundy drinkers whose kidneys have been working all night, or the bloodshot eyes of the student, or the purple wedding rings round the eyes of lovers, or the dank locks of dancers on the morning after a ball, or the gambler's skin in which one can see a reflection of the green cloth. From the bedclothes issued the strong irregular features of a man of thirty which, lifted in the middle by the narrow ridge of the nose, seemed to fall gently away along the slope of the cheeks. His day-old beard accentuated the heaviness of his jaw.
Lewis had no office furniture or desk. Neither card indexes nor Turkey carpets nor crocodile skin armchairs. He never worked anywhere except in his bedroom, like a poetess. The same pieces of furniture which saw him when he was ill, or daydreaming amongst books scattered on the floor, or staying in for days, or entertaining queer companions, also witnessed his labours as a business man. In his Buhl bureau there was one drawer for files, one for handkerchiefs, one for memoranda, one for hairbrushes, one for engineers' reports, and one for marginal deals (all his cheques smelt of brilliantine).
When Martial came along in the morning, he was more like a provincial on his way through Paris coming to see a friend to pass the time, than a secretary with the mail. If Lewis was going out all night Martial found a note pinned to the pillow with instructions for buying and selling when the market opened, the people whom he wanted to see if they called, etc.
But the house soon filled up, for Lewis was always known to be in during the morning. Clients, Stock Exchange runners, commission agents and brokers began to arrive. The telephone rang continuously in a sharp querulous way, punctuated by the alphabetic hail of typewriters. A private exchange was installed at the head of his bed, keeping him in touch with his offices, his engineers, his desk at the Bourse. (When he woke late he could listen to the tidal sound of buying and selling from the depths of his bed clothes.) All this agitation, this modern comfort, this life of violence, of expenditure of nervous energy and of speculation was in curious contrast with the portly seventeenth-century mansion in a leafy road on the Rive Gauche. Through the windows a Le Nôtre garden unfolded itself, restored in every detail (even to a reinforced concrete pergola) by the actual owners, who were Mexicans. The trees and artificial lakes were blue with frost, for it was mid-winter. There was nothing to remind one of Sicily but some labelled samples of sulphur in a bowl, and occasional patches of ultramarine in the sky.
Lewis was dictating from his bed, laying down the facts of some disputed question.
"I am only an amateur, really," he used to say. "I don't work to 'woo the fickle goddess Fortune' or to be a 'money baron' or any of the other Yellow Press expressions. I work to amuse myself. Negotiating loans amuses me more than yachting, and floating companies more than playing poker. That's all it is."
Lewis did not lay the results of his journey to Sicily before the directors of the Franco-African. Obstinately, in accordance with his first idea, he got together the necessary capital and floated a limited company on his own account; the share certificates were being printed. As soon as they were fully issued he would have them quoted on the Paris Bourse; in a year they would be quoted at Trieste and in New York. A whole army of technical men, chemists, mechanics, etc., was on its way out. Lewis counted on work being seriously begun at San Lucido by the end of the month.
The effect of this satisfactory state of affairs on him was to develop in him a moroseness almost amounting to neurasthenia. Like many men of his generation, Lewis was at once practical and imbalanced, matter-of-fact and neurotic. He complained that success clung to him like a "bad patch" to a gambler. He always made a profit even from the riskiest ventures; it was about this time that the Steel and Smelting Company managed to keep four huge furnaces of two hundred and fifty tons capacity each alight at Gebel Hadid, in spite of the industrial crisis, and everyone knows in what an enormous profit that resulted. What irritated him most was the impression of success he gave everyone, when all his successes were far smaller than he expected. He had left the card room at the club the day before because he was bored with winning. "Financiers," he said, "are only clear-sighted in financial matters. It is a gift, a kink; in everything else they're idiots. The entire French nation goes in for nothing but finance. It's the last straw."
Was Lewis in love with Irene?
He had imagined himself so often to be in love, always either stopping himself or being stopped in due course, that he did not like to answer the question. He would have been afraid of driving himself into it. Lewis imagined that he lived in perfect harmony with himself in a kind of solitary egoism from which he never emerged save to satisfy his instincts, and he meant to go on living like that. It must not be forgotten that Lewis had no great strength of character. Very far from it. He always said that in love it is never dangerous to hit above the belt. He did not believe in too much self-examination. Neither pride nor personal integrity mattered to turn, as he always acted on impulse. His reflexes stood him in the stead of morals and education.
This indifference did not now prevent him from feeling his heart sink occasionally beneath the load of some obscure weight, some feeling of uneasiness. Where did this chronic condition originate? In Sicily?
His self-esteem had not been called into play at all. At no moment had he, as the Orientals say, "lost face." Quite the contrary. And yet, ever since those few words which he spoke to put an end to the conversation of that one evening, he had felt himself dominated, kept in check by an invisible will, by the emanations of a personality whose influence neither distance nor time could weaken. On the occasion of Pascal's centenary, Lewis had read in his diary some of the thoughts of that too little-known author. He remembered one: "The first effect of love is to inspire a profound respect." It had made him laugh, and then it had made him think. As a rule he only thought of Irene as of a business rival. Sometimes as a human being as well. But that any woman was not made to sacrifice herself (to him, of course) amazed him; that a woman could have any duties unconnected with love shocked him.
Lewis sought for help against these strange and new sentiments which beset him amongst other people. Most of them failed him, as usual. But he had at least the consolation of taking hostages and sacrificing victims.
MADAME MAGNAC was not the least of these.
Lewis upbraided her for surrounding herself with armorial bindings and greyhounds; for giving people wines so old that they had gone bad; food so cooked that there was nothing left of it. For being a slave to appearances, for having one of those Christian names that age with the years, which is serious, but which do not age with their bearers, which is awful. For being afraid of divorce for provincial reasons, disguised behind the bigotry of the Faubourg Saint Germain. He began to hate her drawing-room, which looked like a room on the Classic stage. He prated of purity: Madame Magnac retorted, not inappropriately, that women are what men make them. He was irritated with her misquoting Taoist philosophers, with her beginning to wear a tired look (she looked like a shop-soiled book fading in the window); with her wealth of which she made no worthy use; with her pre-war figure; with her salon which was nothing but a society clinic; with her snobbishness, which classed and unclassed her; with her proud bearing, which disguised a thousand weaknesses; with her artistic taste, which was really nothing but a form of vigilance—which to a certain extent everyone possesses; with her jadishness, the distribution of her favours (all the more because she did not even trouble to keep her infidelities from him); with her telegrams to crowned heads, with the inevitable replies from their secretaries; with her lies and her habit of calling the Duc de Vendôme by his Christian name when he wasn't there; with her lack of candour and charm; with her pretensions to exoticism, continually taking things up and dropping them again; with her Marcel waves; with her tiaras of kingfisher feathers, which gave her the grotesque and ridiculous appearance of an Arlesian effigy; with her bath sunk into the floor; with her mania for being in the midst of everything whilst pretending to live the life of a recluse; with her way of answering when anyone asked if she intended to be present at a party to which she had not been invited: "I really cannot, I have had to go on strike."
LEWIS lived alone. He took his meals in his room, went to bed at nine o'clock and pulled the bedclothes over his head the better to isolate himself; he pursued his thoughts without much result, but at any rate with honesty. He began to find limitations in himself. Was he good, or only pitiless?
He was aware of having changed, of no longer being what he had been a year before at that time. So that, without quite having lost confidence in himself, he was no longer sure that he could do anything he liked and that anything could either be bought or seized. He began to ask himself of what use he was in this world. Every time he met a good woman who avoided his gaze his heart seemed to falter.
FROM a taste for poverty, Lewis began to spend a great deal of money.
No longer furnishing his house according to his needs, he began to decorate it according to a definite scheme. Artistic objects had cluttered up his room like old iron in the liberated regions of France. He turned them all out. He began to study the best periods of art. Aided by his instincts, he soon passed through the lower stages, coming back to first principles by abstract methods, like all Modernists. He grasped the fact that an age like our own is great enough to disregard tradition.
He no longer visited the shops to which Madame Magnac used so often to take him after lunch. He avoided those old curiosity shops which had grown up since the war, like cheap eating houses round a racecourse. From the insipidity of the by-products of the eighteenth century, which hung their sky-blue bows in the Rue la Boétie, alarmed by the propinquity of negro masks, and jostled by the rigid interpretations of Cubist masters, to the farmhouse furniture of the Boulevard Raspail which was handed over to specially bred worms to eat, passing by the German antiquaries of the Place Vendôme where our rickety fifteenth-century Madonnas dwell in shivering captivity. Those dismal rooms furnished with "association pieces," those beds made for guilty passion in dimly-lit Louis XVI rooms, and which one sees lit up by motor head-lamps in the Faubourg Saint Honoré in the evenings, the delicate china which quivers at the change in the value of the pound sterling and the passing of omnibuses, all these things disgusted Lewis; he was disgusted by the little plump hands of the art experts, organizing the emigration of all this poor French furniture created for solitude, grace and modesty, and which would turn up again in the antipodes, probably upside down.
THE days followed each other as monotonously as long-distance runners with their numbers on their backs like the leaves of a calendar.
Lewis no longer went anywhere and refused all invitations. He catalogued his books. He gnawed the ends of his pencils and bit through his pipes. He got pleasure out of wasting time. "I am out of work," he said, "and I am learning to be lazy."
When Martial expressed surprise, asking him: "Are you preparing for your examination of conscience?"
Lewis replied: "I have work to do for which I am not sufficiently equipped."
"What work?"
"Indulgence, patience and the confutation of errors."
"Poor old chap," decided Martial, "I don't know who it is, but you've certainly got it badly this time."
"BY the way," said Lewis, without guarding against the association of ideas, "what do you think of that?" And he held out to Martial a telegram that had come from Pastafina that morning.
"Do you know that this business, which at first seemed so perfectly easy to run, is beginning to worry me seriously?"
"It's always the same story. I don't like these affectuosissimo and dilatory replies followed by complete silence."
And yet six weeks before a party of carefully chosen engineers had been despatched to San Lucido. Their prospecting continued to have excellent results, but so far not a stroke of actual work had been done. Formality after formality with an anti-French municipality ended in nothing but further checks, and permission to construct the railway line past the foot of Battaglia had been refused, in spite of an appeal to the Courts; they had had to face the prospect of getting their produce to the shore by a service of lorries which was rendered precarious by the absence of fuel supplies and an execrable road.
When the question arose of the establishment of an outlet to the sea and the utilization of the creek nearest to the works (the very one where Lewis used to bathe) it was far worse: the Company certainly possessed the authority and the possibility of building piers fairly quickly for loading ships; but they found that though, as shown on the maps, there was quite enough water, there was a chain of reefs just outside which made it dangerous for cargo boats to approach in rough weather. And so they had to consider loading from tenders on the high seas. After several attempts this had to be given up and they turned to the west, to Marmarole; there the land at the back of the south jetty was admirably adapted for the disposition of sheds and warehouses. But when they decided to make use of it, they were told that all the land had been let a short time before (the deal had been carried through in haste anonymously, and nothing had been done with the land since). Labour problems became more and more complicated: where before labour had been scarce, it had now disappeared altogether; where labour could be found the Trades Unions demanded such high wages that it was useless to start work. The emigration offices, the local Press, the local authorities, the Labour Bureau, the election agents, even the delegates of the Mafia seemed for once to be at one, banded together against this French undertaking. In whose pay were all these people? Lewis instituted enquiries. Some interesting facts came to light. Soon the hand of the Compagnia Pascali of Palermo appeared; behind them, issuing orders to them, a combine of Malto-Italian banks whose instructions were discovered to come from No. 8 Via Petrarcha, Trieste; in other words, from the Apostolatos Bank.
SOME time after this Lewis went to supper with a famous Champagne merchant who, in spite of his age and a rather assailable position, still financed a good number of charming little ladies.
After crossing one of those streets in the Champ de Mars which seem to be cut in butter, Lewis entered a little house at an hour when there were no longer any servants about: anyone who liked could go in by the open door. Unlike the Magnac Salon, it was an unfashionable house, in other words an amusing one, full of pretty women and good vintage wine (that pink 1911, like disguised raspberry syrup), and where no expense was spared for the entertainment of the guests; even to the extent of having gifts beneath every napkin. The host was celebrating that evening the thirtieth anniversary of a secret malady which had not interfered with his tempestuous mode of life. To this party, of which Paris had been talking for weeks, he had invited all the specialists who had treated him during these thirty years, and even the lady to whom he owed what was, after all, so little worry, and whom he discovered at Laval where she ran a church furnishing shop. She sat opposite him at the head of his table, wearing a bonnet and a dress of Alençon lace.
Lewis was at the daffodil table (each table being named after a colour), next to Hector Lazarides who was sucking at his Homard à l'Americaine and wearing a helmet with a nose-piece which made him look like the Greeks of Pericles in Duruy's manual. Lazarides was an old Greek parasite who, after twenty centuries, still remained the Gnatho of ancient comedy, and who lived in an attic facing the Tuileries in a hotel in the Rue de Rivoli. A gay old sentimental corsair, he hawked things about, looked after his friends' wives and took them out, stayed in bed when he had no victims, "fallen between two mugs," he used to say, or, "in the dead season," and if by some oversight he was asked down to the country he never left. (To such a point that the Prince de Waldeck had to have the wing in which he had put him up for one night pulled down after two years in order to get rid of him.) He was always asking people to find him something to do. When anyone offered him a job he would refuse with dignity, saying: "I can make more than that by borrowing." An impecunious old snob, he had only abandoned the scepticism of a lifetime at the sight of his fallen monarch, whom he set about serving with a guilty fervour. But even this did him no good, because far from his Francophobia strengthening his social position in Paris, as it generally does. Fate willed that people should frown on it; so that he was thenceforth, like this evening, forced to spend the night amongst the higher strata of commerce.
He could not be too civil to Lewis, taking off his helmet, bowing his head on which three hairs still curled like electric bell wires. Lewis brought the conversation round to Greece and to Irene.
"But I knew her quite well as a child!" cried Lazarides, "at Aix, at Nauheim, at Zalzomazziore (he exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness the lisp that Trieste Greeks have borrowed from the Venetians). She used to look after her father, a choleric old gentleman who was always blackguarding his servants and distributing five franc pieces amongst the little ladies who called him 'papa.' I saw her again as a young girl in Rome. There she married Pericles Apostolatos who, following the Greek custom, was old enough to be her father; he was at school with me at Condorcet. He killed himself two years ago after some unsuccessful speculations. As he was only a trustee, his personal fortune passed to the creditors; but as Irene is a modern young woman she went into business with the help of her cousins, paid her husband's debts and built up his fortune again; now, as you probably know, she is practically the head of the Apostolatos Bank. Such a thing is unheard of in the history of Greece. She is a thoroughly excellent girl and she hasn't had much of a time. Brought up in our old school. You Parisians have no idea of what that means, what an awful thing youth can be, shut up in those huge Oriental houses whose doors never open save to admit the cephalonite priest who comes to teach thePistevo, our creed, and then a premature marriage, often by proxy."
"And yet," said Lewis, "I have met young Greek girls at Marseilles, playing tennis on the courts in the Avenue de la Cadenelle...."
"The Marseilles Greeks are middle-class people who try to make themselves pleasant to the French and to marry into the local families. There is no connection between these and ancient Hellenic strongholds like Trieste. There the aristocracy is closely hedged round, impenetrable, and no misalliances are possible. They will have none of the little dowry-hunting Italian Counts, and they marry big black satyrs who talk through their noses and, grunting like pigs, make huge wedding presents, of Viennese taste, to their brides. It's nothing to laugh at. Think of these charming little girls going off with their languorous eyes to conquer thegambros, the betrothed, followed by their families—those Greek families which move all together like migratory sardines in the Mediterranean: abruptly to be shown the secret of life, and then to be worn out with motherhood and submerged for ever."
Having spoken, Lazarides blew into a little limp skin which he had in the palm of his hand, and this became a green duck which took flight over the table with a penetrating scream and was killed by someone with a fork.
The conversation was interrupted by a stag hunt through the house in which the manager of a big bank in the Place Vendôme took the rôle of the stag with the pegs from the hat rack. It ended in a porphyry bath where the hard-pressed animal and taken refuge, the tails of his coat floating amongst the strawberries which the hot water had made it impossible for him to retain.
When the party broke up at dawn, their feet sunk in the rainy pavement beneath the Eiffel Tower slumbering above the clouds, Lazarides went home charged with an important mission which he alone could bear to Trieste, by those mysterious primitive telepathies of the Greeks, which are the wonder of the western world: Lewis, after some very bitter moments, had resigned himself to begging to inform that he was ready to negotiate and to give up part or, if necessary, the whole of the mines of San Lucido.
What reply would he get to these overtures?
TO right and left of Lewis the motors purred evenly, changing their song occasionally with the wind. He was in front, in a sort of veranda commanding the English Channel; between his knees he held a paper bag in which to give up his soul if the passage were rough. But the weather was fine and the aeroplane floated on the elastic air, now and then leaping lightly over invisible dips and charging seemingly impenetrable clouds. Lewis read, without understanding them, Freud's three essays on sexuality, which cause the barrier of innocence to recede to such an alarming extent. Occasionally he raised his eyes and saw before him through the incurved windows, the sea pink-tinted by the setting sun, rippling away into space like a tapioca pudding. Held up by little half-inches of sail, the fishing fleet was entering Boulogne, six thousand feet below. Preening themselves with their little wisps of smoke, tugboats were preparing to drop their anchors for the night beyond the jetty. Lewis laughed as he saw beneath him the ports, roads, stations, all this human material of another age. Behind him some Americans were discussing the rates of exchange with the roar of gold machinery in their mouths, and at the very end of the fuselage lay boxes of frocks, a ton of morning papers and cherries at five francs each for Piccadilly.
The sand dunes of France disappeared and with them those brackish swamps where the salt leaves tracks like those of snails. Soon Lewis found himself over the well-nourished English downs. (No, England is not scraggy, she is only a little low chested.) A model for an ideal country. France from a bird's eye view is like a patchwork quilt; it is all used up in samples: mosaic fields cut up into strips whittled away at each end by the succession laws. Roads so straight that they might have been cut with a knife, breaking away at the villages round which they make rectilinear patterns, like the petals of meagre flowers. The English country road is less rational and less sensible, but much more shady and companionable.
Dusk was falling. A blue mist was rising, covering everything but the billowy tree tops and the pointed roofs of the coast houses. Then came the London suburbs out of which the crowds seemed to rise like bubbles to the surface of a pond full of organic matter, and the first trams with their headlights and BOVRIL in letters of flame. It was only light now in the sky. Why do we say that night falls? Surely it rises. At last the motors died down, the propellors appeared suddenly, the travellers' ears began to sing, and each blade of grass became gigantic as it swayed in the rush of air: Croydon aerodrome.
How far from Le Bourget, left only two hours before, far from the Abattoirs and the Flanders road bordered, as if by geraniums, by slaughtered pigs and petrol pumps, towards the stony desert of the aerodrome where the huge aeroplanes sweating green oil sleep in their reinforced concrete stables. Where was the stream of pretty painted work girls, so lissom and exotic, leaving their work in Paris like Seville cigarette makers? Here one fell right into the arms of the Anglican Church. Sunday: Evensong: the 5th chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. The country offered to the traveller not the dismal countenance of a railway station, but a green countryside, with new-washed cheeks. Let us make a chimney descent into the heart of the English home. In the clubs the diners were allowed, for that evening only, to dine in day clothes. On the Sabbath, that weekly day of catalepsy, the basements of the houses were all shut up and the servants who lived there were at church; the Salvationists sang in a South Eastern Railway tunnel in which the smoke obstinately lingered; the Israelites, who are opposed to the silk hat habit, were returning home from the symphony concerts; the playing fields were empty, under a curse; not a wisp of smoke came from the chimney pots, for everyone was having cold supper. The only places open were the fire stations and the public houses reeking of leather and malt.
Lewis was driven to London to a hotel in the Strand. His room looked out over the Thames, which at this point traces a soft silvery curve towards the Houses of Parliament. He opened his bag and took out the files in it. He stared for a moment at the one on which was written "San Lucido" in blue pencil. He shrugged his shoulders wretchedly.
THE next morning at about midday Lewis walked up Fleet Street towards Old Jewry where the Apostolatos Bank had its London branch.
Fleet Street bows down and sags beneath the weight of the railway bridge and of bundles of newspapers and then, as though shot up by a spring board, leaps up Ludgate Hill towards St. Paul's Cathedral, scales it and rises to the copper pink sky. On the hoardings are views of Wales with blue skies as deceptive as the Celts themselves; on another poster a gentleman in a quilted dressing gown is smoking by his fireside surrounded by children playing amongst his legs like lion cubs, pictures which appear to excite the natural laziness of the natives.
Lewis skirted St. Paul's to where the unfrosted windows of the wholesale merchants begin, and came at last to the old Jewry and the Apostolatos Bank, an Adam house, ivory white outside and painted inside in sea green and dark brown in Dickensian shades, with the legend on the door in black letters:—
APOSTOLATOS BANKFOREIGN BANKERS, FOUNDED IN 1846.FREIGHTAGE, ADVANCES ON MERCHANDISE.BRANCHES AT ATHENS, SALONICA,ARGOS, KALAMATA, CORFU, NAUPLIA,LARISSA, VOLO, CANEA, MYTILENE.Special shipments to the Piraus.
These Greek names, torn from coasts so tormented that Reclus compares them to the convolutions of the human brain, exiled to the north like the metopes of the Parthenon, sparkled here with such Oriental fire that Lewis blinked. They recalled to him warmth, sweet lemons and the Mediterranean so full of salt that it makes marks like fruit stains on one's clothes.
The ground floor contained wooden counters and ledgers like antiphonals as tall as the book-keeper himself, bound in whole ox skins and studded with brass nails. This entrance was like the window of Lock's hat shop, and bore witness to the venerable age of a firm which, though foreign, claimed respect as a right by virtue of its good old English methods and neatly a century of commercial probity.
In the upper stories everything had been altered; polished brass plates replaced the black painted letters, and the old folios had been dethroned by American filing devices. Worked by a one-armed sergeant plastered with medals, modern lifts sucked the customers upwards to the roof. On the third floor Lewis passed through the general office, where an army of youths with heads shining like patent leather boots worked behind polished bars, and was introduced into the private offices of the Bank: a thick pile carpet, frosted windows and enamelled spittoons with the encouraging inscription: "Make sure of your aim"; in the anteroom those outward signs of English commercial standing: silk hats and umbrellas.
The drum of the revolving door beat the salute and the three directors of the Apostolatos Bank, supported by their general manager, Mr. Rota, rose to their feet. They were waiting for Lewis in the middle of the huge office lined with strong boxes let into the wall, with portraits of the Chairman of the Bank in 1846, 1852, 1867 and 1876 (all of them, even though Greeks to the core, become either from vanity or necessity English knights, Turkish pashas, Austrian barons, etc.; in each case there was a change in the cut of the frock coat and the shape of the top hat).
They examined one another. Lewis saw that beneath their ultra British exteriors, their lounge coats, buttonholes and fancy trousers of City men, he was dealing with Orientals, jealous, passionate, untutored, sons of men who had specialized in exactly the same kind of business for a century, negotiating it with tradition, patience and greed; in fact the exact opposite to himself. Their skin, in contrast to that of their English subordinate staff, was yellow.
Some Samos wine was brought and they got to work. They worked quickly, these Greeks having sacrificed to Anglo-Saxon methods their natural taste for verbiage and quibbling.
The conditions were as follows:—
The Apostolatos Bank were prepared to take over the San Lucido property for the sum of £150,000 sterling. In addition, they would refund the money spent on works concessions, on commissions and adjudications, and the sums advanced for harbour dues. The Greeks were also to take over the material already brought to the spot and would compensate the French Bank for the two waterfalls already harnessed and for the turbines installed, even taking over the dynamos then on their way between Marseilles and Porto Empedocle. In consideration of this, 167,000 shares (out of the 200,000 which Lewis controlled) would pass into their black Palikar paws.
At this moment a boy brought in a message.
The oldest, Pisistrates, his skull as bare as a Greek landscape, pulled out his watch:—
"My cousin Irene has telephoned to say she will be a few minutes late. She only landed from Trieste this morning. It is essential that she should be here for the exchange of signatures."
"ARE you going back to the West End?"
"I am going further. I am staying with my uncle Solon in Bayswater," said Irene.
"Let me drive you back."
"I'd much better drive you back to your hotel; I've got a car."
"Well, as a matter of fact, I want to talk to you," said Lewis, bluntly.
"Very well, then."
They went out together and crossed the road through the lunch-time traffic, through the crush of lorries and buses wedged together like pack ice and loaded to bursting point, in the canyon-like streets, between the streams of people emitted from the offices to be swallowed up underground or to lunch standing up in bars and in A.B.C. tea shops.
They got out at Knightsbridge Barracks. The last of the morning riders were coming in, and already the afternoon hacks, loose-jointed, with lack-lustre coats and harness, smelling of the livery stable, were taking possession of the Row. They went obliquely across the grass dotted with big trees, whose branches were as regular as those of genealogical trees; English girls wearing imitation amber necklaces were going home, with novels bound in green cloth under moist armpits, accompanied by long limp youths who walked with bent knees, carrying their hats in their hands.
"Just now in that office you frightened me even more than you did in Sicily," said Lewis.
"And now?"
"Not so much now. When you are doing nothing you are much more like other women. I've often thought of you.... Are you romantic?"
"No, romance was invented by people who have no hearts. Personally, my thoughts have been of San Lucido."
"And now you have got your reward. You are a good business woman; you know how to persevere."
"And you are a good business man because you know when you are beaten."
"Shall I tell you why I let you beat me? I did it to see you again," said Lewis, softly.
"Don't be silly. You gave in because you couldn't do anything else. You were heading for financial quicksands when the time came to pay. You've got a cool head so you cut off a finger to save your hand, as they say at the Bourse."
"Financial quicksands for the Franco-African?" asked Lewis. "For a little matter of six million lire?"
"It's nothing to do with the Franco-African," retorted Irene, calmly. "It's you. You've been acting all through this business entirely on your own account without consulting your Board. Do you think I don't know that? You acted from pride, as I should possibly have done myself. In proportion as your difficulties increased—and I don't deny that I helped—your personal resources, or those of your friends, diminished. A time comes when the fight of one against many becomes impossible, don't you see? I knew you could appeal to your backers. But I also guessed that you would rather give up the mine than lay the situation before them when it was going badly. Wasn't I right?"
Lewis kept his eyes fixed on the ground. "Yes," he replied, furiously, "of course you are right."
There was a short pause.
"It's no good trying to do anything with you," he went on. "Why aren't you a woman?"
The blood rushed to Irene's face and flooded it with a soft pink. Her eyes grew misty and her mouth trembled.
Lewis saw that he had hurt her. He grew calm at once.
"Is there pain in your heart or only in your eyes?... Please forgive me. I only meant: why do you always think before you speak, why do you never smile, why don't your pupils dilate with interest when you are being discussed? Why do you think of what other people are doing?"
Irene could not get past his previous statement.
"It isn't that. Don't make fun of me. What did you mean when you asked me why I was not a woman? Is it because I am well-balanced? It is a perfectly natural balance."
"I am naturally well-balanced, too," replied Lewis. "I can walk about in the dark with a glass of water without spilling a drop."
She interrupted him.
"Don't treat it as a joke."
"Surely when one has being doing serious business one can laugh afterwards? Would you rather I sulked over my defeat?"
"You always fall on your feet like a cat.... I don't like dreamers."
"Personally, I hate sensible people. I am suspicious of fanatics and I believe in mercy."
"I admire perfection.... We could go on like this all day. It is just two o'clock, and when people are late for meals uncle Solon gets sullen."
"Before leaving you," said Lewis, "one last question: there is nothing subtle between us, is there?"
Irene shrugged her shoulders.
"Oh! dear, no."
"That's just what I thought," answered Lewis.