Part 3 — VIII

SHORTLY afterwards the head office of the Apostolatos Bank in France was transferred from Marseilles to Paris. Irene accepted the appointment of general manager. The Greek firm was gradually giving up freighting and mercantile advances, and concentrating on big industrial undertakings and international finance. Thanks to this alteration of policy and to the amount of foreign capital they managed to attract, the shares of their affiliated companies, the "Olympic Chemical Produce Company" and the "Spartan Electricity Corporation" (for exploiting Thomson Houston systems in Peloponnesia), had doubled in value in a few months. The name of Apostolatos was, besides, "highly esteemed" in Paris, and the prize-bond drachma loan began to find its way on to the French market. There was only one shadow over all this prosperity, namely a strain in Græco-Italian relations arising from the seizure of a Greek steamship in the Adriatic, and which was in danger of having unpleasant results.

At the Franco-African Bank the situation was quite different. Lewis found it difficult to retrieve his position there. He had left the house in great disorder. That he might run it without any control, like a proud master, he had been careful, during his years of management, never to keep anyone else informed of what was going on, to depute nothing, to classify no papers, carrying through deals without leaving any trace of them in writing, taking the files that interested him home and not bringing them back; as soon as he left, the bold undertakings which he only kept going by his enthusiasm or his daring, began to totter. People did not hesitate to discredit him. His strokes of luck became errors, his impetuosity sheer madness. When he came back the spirit of the management had changed. A whole hierarchy of unenterprising managers and timid patriarchs had got back the upper hand and took a mean outlook on things, treating them administratively without provision for the future, feebly and apathetically. Lewis wandered amongst them like a wild beast amongst a herd of cattle. He had to employ all his recovered violence to reimpose himself on them.

Work came back like a true friend: Irene put the finishing touches to his prosperity. Lewis reasserted himself and they were convinced that they would soon be as perfectly united in their work as they were in their love.

Different interests, earlier rising, hurried meals, these would all make the hours spent together more precious. Their pleasures would become escapades; their petty worries would gradually disappear. Profit taking interrupted their tender glances, urgent clearances distracted them from the ardour which united them. The striving after perfection which wrecks even the most wonderful love would be diverted into other channels. All the marvels of business existence, its dangers, the hazards of new financial ventures, the unsettled state of foreign exchanges, the pathos of liquidations and carrying over, must establish a greater sense of quiet, abundance, and permanence between them than the most intimate and temperate life ever could accomplish.

But it was not so. These two beings who had such abundant and such natural reasons for loving one another, saw their happiness fade day by day. Lewis was both the cause and the first victim of this, for he had nothing like Irene's strength of character.

It often happened that one of them opened letters meant for the other. Irene apologised on reading the first line. But Lewis could not resist reading on to the end, even after seeing that it was an Apostolatos letter.

Irene worked without any help, transacting business in her mind whilst dressing herself; Lewis could not do without a secretary, and the head of Martial reappeared against the daily background.

Like a good many business men, Lewis knew no arithmetic, and was lost like a child in the rule of three.

Irene made fun of him:

"You will finish like my uncle Priam," she said. "One evening he balanced his accounts and discovered an enormous deficit, so he blew his brains out. The next day they found he had made a mistake in his calculations. He left my aunt Clytemnestra six million francs."

The telephone bell rang. Lewis unhooked the receiver with an expressionless face, but his eyes hardened.

"It's for you, darling," he said.

He took umbrage at Irene's professional skill. He asked himself how she could be so self-sufficient. She was never late, and she received visits, drew up memoranda, answered letters and dictated reports without any apparent effort. Irene's office was always tidy, everything being cleared up at the end of each morning. Lewis' office was crammed with invoices and with memoranda vainly waiting for an answer. Irene was extremely generous in all her dealings ("Always give people plenty of rope," she said), especially when it was a question of dealing with Greeks. One felt that between Greeks there immediately arose a sort of understanding and that certain kinds of treachery were impossible. Lewis, on the other hand, had to travel alone, sword in hand, his eyes wide open, always on the alert in that atmosphere of western finance where bad faith predominates.

Irene came from a long line of goldsmith bankers who dealt in actual bullion. Lewis belonged to a generation which believes only in industrial undertakings, and has never even seen gold, and he despised deposit banks and deposits themselves which, however, he had no scruples about re-investing as he thought fit, if necessary even against the wishes of his customers. Irene followed tradition, considered thrift as being almost holy, had great respect for debentures and Government securities, and took the trouble to buy Members of Parliament and the Press; "... to be a banker," she said, "is to observe a thousand strict laws and never to act rashly."

Lewis, with feudal post-war pride, revolted from these slow methods: he was wrong. The union of politics and finance produce ugly children, but hardy ones.

"Irene," he used to say, "you represent monopolies and extortion."

"And you," she retorted, "stock jobbing and speculation."

Sometimes Lewis refused a transaction which it bored him to carry through. In this respect he was like a woman. Irene left nothing to chance; everything was grist that came to her mill. She did not forget that modern credit is the granddaughter of usury. She made use of other people's leavings. She took care not to trespass on Lewis' territory (similar enterprizes in the Mediterranean often caused their interests to overlap). But if Lewis handed her over a deal to see what she would do with it, Irene applied herself to it and favourable results soon appeared. Then Lewis regretted it. Although he proudly concealed the fact, Irene saw through him and in her frank way offered not to go on with it. But he, sulkily, would not learn his lesson; he found it difficult to forgive.

Certainly the admiration he had for Irene never abated; but sometimes he had bitter thoughts about her.

He reproached himself for them; but the images he tried to banish from his mind merely returned with greater frequency.

One morning Lewis said to Irene:

"I shan't be in to-day. I've got a business lunch on."

He was on the point of telling her all about it, and to explain to her that it was a question of examining some very attractive offers from an American combine with a view to establishing wireless communication with Asia Minor and even Persia. But, perhaps in order to intrigue Irene—believing her to be as jealous as he was—perhaps, even though she was discretion itself, in order that no word of the matter should leak out, he said nothing.

That evening, seized with remorse, he took up the tale where he had left it in the morning.

"I hadn't time to explain. I invited two American bankers to luncheon. They have just come from London ..."

"Isn't it about the wireless in Asia Minor?" interrupted Irene. "Be very careful; your people have not, as they pretend, got the Marconi Company behind them. They came to me with it a week ago and I made some inquiries. It is not a serious proposition."

In less time than one could imagine the intercourse between them began to lose sincerity. On Irene's side it was because she felt that her husband was drifting away from her. On Lewis' side it was because at every turn he found her to be his master. He had the impression of continuing a struggle against an intimate and skilful adversary who had made him bite the dust at their first encounter. That enterprise of the San Lucido mines which had brought them together by separating them, and of which a few months earlier Lewis could not think without emotion because it had been the origin of his happiness, now humiliated him as it prospered more and more: he found himself loathing it when he read that it was entering on its second financial year, that the profits had been most satisfactory and that there was quite a possibility of a dividend being declared.

He remembered on that occasion that it was the anniversary of their meeting in Sicily. He promised himself that he would take Irene some of the pungent and intoxicating jasmin of that first evening.