Part 1 — III

"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.