Part 3 — XIII

THREE weeks after issue the Greek loan had been doubly subscribed at the offices of the Apostolatos Bank alone. One evening Irene and Lewis decided to celebrate this success and to emerge from their solitude.

There were no half-measures in their celebration.

Irene wore a silver tissue dress which contrasted with her face, deepening the warmth of her Oriental complexion: she was black and silver like the ikons of her country.

"How perfect she is," thought Lewis, going to fetch her in her room, and looking at her lithely curving body beneath the clinging dress.

They dined, too well, in the midst of dancing, rounded shoulders, and machine-like dinner jackets. Irene compared these stars from the Rue de la Paix, the laughter and the surfeit of make-up, with Trieste in the evening, with its two cinemas and the officers wrapped in their capes stalking up and down before the Café du Veneto. The whole evening they wandered from one cabaret to another, from the Rue Caumartin to Montmartre. Up there Lewis met some friends.

Whilst a dancer, caught in a bundle of limelight rays, was carrying his partner off round his neck like a deer, Irene found herself being introduced to a handsome, self-possessed, slightly faded woman with a geranium-coloured mouth and sly eyes, who immediately took an interest in her.

At the first opportunity she asked Lewis her name.

"Why, it's Elsie Magnac."

Lewis had often spoken of her. Without ever having met her Irene had taken a dislike to her.

"I don't even like to think of her being alive," she told Lewis one day.

What wrong opinions one can form of people! Elsie Magnac was charming. They became friends at once. She joined their party. They danced and drank together.

Towards one o'clock they found themselves, all three, on the Place Pigalle. The open air smote them. The carriages were half asleep; the luminous signs were becoming lethargic.

"I will drive you home," said Madame Magnac.

The car slid down the slopes of Montmartre, whitened by the snows of cocaine, through the streets lit up like a harbour in that feast of electricity punctuated by the spasmodic nervous jerkings of sky signs. Russian cabarets faced Argentine ranches, Moorish cafés and Brazilian dives stood opposite Caucasian cellars and Chinese restaurants. Occasionally, overwhelmed by this cosmopolitan glut, a gaunt scared Frenchman stole along.

Irene was seated between Madame Magnac and Lewis. She was conscious of them looking at each other behind her back, and uttering soundless words to each other. When Madame Magnac left them they went up to their rooms. Irene faltered and almost collapsed. She felt herself spinning like a Dervish: Lewis seemed to be all round her. She no longer had the strength to resist some force, some sequence of events which followed each other inevitably. She wanted to say to her husband: "Don't leave me, I feel so ill at ease, so wretched this evening." But he seemed so overwrought, so anxious to leave her that her courage failed her.

With a soft grace and supreme awkwardness she threw herself at his knees:

"I hate that woman! Swear that you will never see Madame Magnac again!"

Lewis reassured her with feline callousness.

"Of course not, if you don't want me to."

She threw her arms passionately round him.

"Now you must go to sleep," he said.

He went out. Irene felt stifled. She opened the window. The night was green and bitter as an apple. The street shone emptily. Only a red light glowed like some mysterious fire grate: the rear lamp of a car. With a feeling of uneasiness Irene went back into her room, put out the light and leant on the window sill once more.

A few moments later the house door opened and a man came out. There was no doubt about it; it was Lewis. He went towards the car standing a little way down the street. Then he stopped and looked up. Reassured, he opened the door of the car. Beneath the electric street lamp Irene saw Madame Magnac's hand, limp and white, as if it had Been severed. The car drove away.