Part 2 — XIV

IT is one of the great advantages of travel that one always gains forty-eight hours before and eight days afterwards by not telling anyone that one has started or returned.

Lewis did not go near Madame Magnac. He worked all day and stayed at home every evening in the hope that Irene would ring him up.

One evening, towards midnight, he had turned out the light and was thinking of her, far away, cut off from him by the sea, and yet, in this room with him (she was in his arms, he was holding her so closely that her breasts were crushed together), when the telephone bell rang. It was like a pistol shot fired beneath his pillow.

It might be Elsie Magnac. He unhooked the receiver and suddenly Irene was close to him, seemed to be sitting at the foot of his bed in the dark: she had telephoned to him whilst he was invoking her, waking him up, and taking advantage of his sleepiness to break his solitude and to insinuate herself into one of those dark corners into which one's daily worries retreat subconsciously during the night.

"Have you been thinking of me, Irene?"

She answered in a low constrained voice:—

"Of course."

She seemed so close that he could almost feel her breath. It left her lips in front of her words; in a tenth of a second it crossed the earth, as dead must talk to dead, coming across the rich soil land of Kent, over Dover Castle, beneath the chalky sea, up the Boulogne sands, along the capricious windings of the Seine, over the roofs of Paris, right up to Lewis' right ear. Lewis was struck with the clearness with which one heard at night, without any roaring or buzzing. The words she spoke seemed fluid, unaffected by distance, and charged with meaning. Lewis wanted to talk to her like a friend, but he found that he only knew her well enough to call her endearing names.

"I am quite close to you, Irene."

That was all. They were cut off. The tragi-comedy of French administration intervened. A young woman with a dry telephonic voice asked him what his number was; then a man with a southern accent and the voice of a policeman, apparently talking from the middle of a parrot house, asked him who was calling him from London; to which he could find no answer.

A few minutes later Irene got through again.

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

"Nor have I. I love you."

The words rang emptily on the edge of the mouthpiece. Lewis felt, however, that at the other side of the Channel his words had struck home.

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

"Either the telephone or the distance spoils her voice," thought Lewis, "making it sound serious and taking away its charm." (Hitherto the voices that woke him up at night rang with silvery laughter, merry voices, saying, "Good morning, you"; younger voices, the staccato or husky voices of little Paris ladies.) But this voice was that of a good woman.

As Lewis was musing in the darkness of his room on the conversation which had just taken place, already finding it difficult to remember it all, so far off did it seem, almost like a conversation in a dream, the telephone bell rang sharply; it was Madame Magnac.

"My dear boy, I am glad to hear you are back. I suppose you're off again soon; all your business seems to take you so far away."

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

"It is the last time you will have that enchanting pleasure," replied Madame Magnac, disdainfully. "Foreign calls always have priority. Good-bye."

After which Lewis found himself alone again.