There were other forces at work, too. It was perhaps melancholy, or the luxuriant somnolence of the Swiss landscape, or the mottled acres of Swiss flesh which had in the end persuaded him. A bachelor in his early forties, Malliakas was moved in general by impulse and his liver. Not rich enough in material or spiritual ways to make the grander gestures of life, he was still too rich to have achieved the work of art, which, in the beginning, had been expected of him. But he continued to try. His pen would threaten the paper, heavy with that unfulfilled promise. At least a talent for the fragment did not prevent Malliakas from deriving pleasure from his own fragments. Though what satisfied him most, of course, was to lounge away the morning on the balconies of the best hotels he could afford, sipping early coffee, and playing with a komboloyi inherited from a relative. Contentment need not content less for being minor, and at such times he would ease his thighs, and peer from under black lids at a touzle of hair, a tumble of buttocks under the plane-trees in the square. If Malliakas sometimes also sighed it was because he had experienced a succession of mistresses, all of them adequate, though none of them memorable for that lingering brilliance on which his imagination still insisted.

Imagination – of all his qualities it was the one he cherished most, yet was unable to boast of what his friends were only able to guess at. On the way to Cologny, to the meeting with Philippides, he sat toying with this secret jewel. Churned around in the sturdy bus, he regretted finding that every Swiss seemed to have achieved a balance, while he, the Greek, could only oppose his undemonstrable inner life and a certain soft elegance. Annoyance tasted bitter in his mouth as he put up his hand and discovered he had forgotten to shave. His chin would be looking its bluest.

By the time they put him down in the lane Malliakas was what his English governess used to call grumpy. Remembering Ellison had referred to Philippides, not only as a hearty octogenarian, but as a grand old gentleman, the gravest doubts slowed him up. Rain had fallen that morning, and pools of water still lay. Clouds hung in summery abundance above the green cumulus of trees. Malliakas sneezed. There was no avoiding anything now. Mud spattered his Italian shoes, as he went on, and into the yard of the house in which Philippides lived, still in some affluence, it seemed, though Ellison had suggested the old man’s fortunes had suffered a decline.

In the wisely-proportioned Swiss doorway of this ample, though unpretentious house, an appropriate girl informed the stranger that Madame Philippides had been called away to a sickbed. One would find Monsieur, however, in the little garden-house at the end of the alley. She began at once to lead the visitor along the gravel, talking amiably of the weather. Malliakas, rather gloomy, examined the contours of the girl’s behind.