[IV]
FOR six weeks Lewis lived on this islet where Irene was the only unwithered thing. In the mornings he put on a veil and went fishing, like Childe Harold,
Warming himself like any other fly.
On his return Irene would wait for him on the quay, surrounded by children with blue shaved heads, by beggars of the old school, black, shiny and wrinkled like olives. She would have been to talk to the refugees from Asia Minor; before the lazaret, outside their tents held down by stones against the Etesian winds, those prolonged winds which bring the warmth and the birds back from the South; they had been camping there for months; the women, still wearing their baggy trousers, spun flax; men, crouching by the fires, cooked mutton on wooden skewers. The meals eaten by Lewis and Irene were hardly less primitive. The fish he caught were fried in a few drops of oil. Sweet peppers. Fruit. Water. Lewis thought longingly of snipe stuffed with foie gras, and wanted to exchange their small table for a larger one. Irene apologized, quoting a Greek proverb: "A halfpenny-worth of olives and a pennyworth of light."
Later, during the empty midday hours when the deserted street seems to waver beneath the eddies of dust where the land breeze and the sea breeze collide, Lewis took his siesta in the stillness of a kind of solar midnight. Towards five o'clock he went out on to the balcony. Just opposite lay the customs house, its miniature Parthenon front set into the ochre barracks, over which the Greek flag floated, like a sky cut into strips. Beneath the solitary eucalyptus, the proprietor of the only Ford which was for hire (ΦOPΔ) invited his friends to sit on the torn American cloth and to take long, motionless journeys. Donkeys came back from the fields, so laden that only their ears and their hooves emerged from the bundles of olive foliage. Above the leper-house rose a flat blue-patterned moon.
"How could the Greeks have lived on these rocky rafts? Was it for these remote and dreary fishermen, for this Southern European Ireland, that the whole of romantic Europe had shed her blood and her ink?" Lewis asked himself.
Twice a week he went down to the café to read Le Journal d'Athènes, edited in French. There he met officials in white linen and black-rimmed glasses who let their nails grow a yard long to show their contempt for manual labour; the lighthouse keeper who willingly lent him his telescope, out of the end of which he screwed marine panoramas, a water-melon seller, the priest with his alpaca sunshade, bearded to the eyes, his coiled hair streaming with oil, who they said had never converted anything except drachmæ into dollars. There they drank bitter coffee in little metal cups that burnt their fingers, and water so clear that the priest, giving thanks to the blue sky, made the Greek sign of the cross over it.
Alone of all Eastern nations the Greeks seem to have struck the happy mean between sluggishness and fanaticism. It is a real feat. Lewis could not accomplish it. Secretly, so that Irene should know nothing of it, seated before this sea dotted with pointed sails, Lewis was disintegrating from sheer boredom. He was succumbing to Mediterranean anæmia, had chosen sluggishness, and was letting himself drift on in a torpor akin to an agreeable demise. He really began to think that he was dead.
One morning Lewis noticed that the public square was in a ferment. Two men were standing on chairs and hurling their black fingers about. The audience was shouting and answering them with raised hands, trying to attract their attention; on inquiry Lewis found out that they were arguing about rates of insurance and that they always gambled like this at the beginning of the harvest of what are known as Corinthian raisins, which was just about to begin. He began to gamble, too. It reminded him of something.... Suddenly there before him, as in a fairy tale, stood another Greek temple also full of enigmatic gods. It was half-past twelve, and 1,500 miles away the Paris Bourse was about to open. Already the earliest quotations were being made in the street. Groups of runners, motionless as the square columns black with figures, pencil marks and caricatures, were straining at the leash. In their oak cubicles, behind green curtains, the bank representatives were taking their final orders on their private wires. Then the bell rang and pandemonium broke loose. The tide flowed in both directions up to the baskets where the orders lost their individuality, swallowed up and absorbed by cross entries, whilst in the greenish glass roof prices were already going up in columns. What a lovely toy!
Sadly Lewis longed for the West, with its sloping roofs, its rivers full of water, hard butter, the wide views of fertile country, the odourless milk, scavengers, the Bois de Boulogne full of women wearing stays, his old Martial, his spotless flat, Elsie Magnac, his other little friends, warm or cold, even Waldeck with his Lavallière tie and his little sideways hop. (Proust once said, "He looks like an aborted partridge.") The Mediterranean appalled him with its volcanic rages, its spasmodic mountains, its barren coast inhabited by sluggish people, its plains scorched like railway embankments, its hard colours, and the monotonous flow of classic torrents beneath the boisterous sun. Oh, for a little grass! He could understand the nostalgia from which Queen Sophie of Greece must have suffered when she asked permission from King Constantine, her husband, to grow ivy on the Acropolis.