Part 1 — V
Vyvyan Beresford Holland translation
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.