England -- Fiction; Experimental fiction; Psychological fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- England -- Fiction; Young men -- Fiction
They would leave Jacob alone, then. Turning very slightly, Evan ordered
something--a bottle of wine--from which he helped Jacob, with a kind of
solicitude, with a kind of paternal solicitude, if that were possible.
To be left alone--that was good for a young fellow. Never was there a
time when the country had more need of men. He sighed.
"And you have been to the Acropolis?" asked Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. And they moved off to the window together, while Evan
spoke to the head waiter about calling them early.
"It is astonishing," said Jacob, in a gruff voice.
Sandra opened her eyes very slightly. Possibly her nostrils expanded a
little too.
"At half-past six then," said Evan, coming towards them, looking as if
he faced something in facing his wife and Jacob standing with their
backs to the window.
Sandra smiled at him.
And, as he went to the window and had nothing to say she added, in
broken half-sentences:
"Well, but how lovely--wouldn't it be? The Acropolis, Evan--or are you
too tired?"
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him,
at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress--not that
she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for
anything he could do, cease its tortures.
They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the
Square of the Constitution.
"Evan is happier alone," said Sandra. "We have been separated from the
newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they
want.... You have seen all these wonderful things since we met.... What
impression ... I think that you are changed."
"You want to go to the Acropolis," said Jacob. "Up here then."
"One will remember it all one's life," said Sandra.
"Yes," said Jacob. "I wish you could have come in the day-time."
"This is more wonderful," said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
"But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time," he said. "You
couldn't come to-morrow--it would be too early?"
"You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?"
"There were some awful women this morning," said Jacob.
"Awful women?" Sandra echoed.
"Frenchwomen."
"But something very wonderful has happened," said Sandra. Ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, half an hour--that was all the time before her.
"Yes," he said.
"When one is your age--when one is young. What will you do? You will
fall in love--oh yes! But don't be in too great a hurry. I am so much
older."
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
"Shall we go on?" Jacob asked.
"Let us go on," she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him--or heard him say--or was
it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon
she discerned it and could not rest.
"You'd never get English people to sit out like this," he said.
"Never--no. When you get back to England you won't forget this--or come
with us to Constantinople!" she cried suddenly.
"But then..."
Sandra sighed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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