Decision at Delphi Read Online Free PDF

at the last inch of Scotch and melted ice. He caught the actor’s side glance, and raised his glass. “Down with all barbarians!” he said crisply, and finished his drink. As he left, the actor was looking—for the first time— directly at him.
    Well, I broke through his boredom for at least a minute, Strang thought as he went down to his cabin. And don’t thank me, pal. I thank you—for letting me talk my head off to myself. A man needs that, every now and again. But it would be better if I could talk out loud to someone who’d listen; and then she could talk her head off, and I’d listen; and then we’d go to bed and make love, and fall deep asleep and wake up happy. That’s my recipe for a good marriage. When I meet a girl who can listen, and talk, and make love, all equally well, then I’ll get married so damned quick that sisters Jennifer and Josephine won’t even have time to raise a pencilled eyebrow.
    The steward Gino, like most Italians, was desolated at the idea of anyone missing a party. So he brought an elegant tray with cold turkey and fruit and sweet cakes and a half-bottle of champagne smuggled out of the dining room. When someone was taking so much delight in providing champagne, it was totally impossible—for Strang, at least—to ask for a Scotch and soda. Or a bottle of beer And he listened while Gino talked about his native Genoa and the little farm outside the city which his wife worked while he sailed the Atlantic. It was a hard life, but Italy was a poor country. Yes, Strang was thinking as the flood of English helped out by Italian poured over him, we are now sailing into a world of poor countries—the Mediterranean, where most people have to scrabble for a very bare living. Yet ask anyone in America or England or the northern countries of Europe what the Mediterranean conjured up for them, and you’d be given sweet dreaming for an answer: sunshine and beaches and yachts in the harbours, music and flowers, long meals and lazy siestas.
    Gino left, and Strang could eat some supper, and begin his letter to Christophorou.
    He kept it as brief as possible. First, a piece of self-identification; next, the purpose of his visit to Sicily and Greece, mentioning Perspective and Stefanos Kladas. Then, the dates in April when he expected to be in Athens. He would be staying at the Grande Bretagne. It would give him the greatest pleasure if Christophorou were able to dine with him. He was, most sincerely...
    He reread the page he had written, grateful that Christophorou’s excellent command of English saved him from floundering into beginner’s Greek. His letter was brief, all right, and clear enough. Then he wondered if Christophorou were still living in Athens. Had he gone back to teaching law at Athens University? It would be pretty silly if Strang found he had missed Christophorou by twenty miles or so, on his visit to the Peloponnese or one of the islands, simply because neither had known the other was there. So, as a safeguard, he added a postscript: “If you will not be in Athens around the middle of April, I hope you’ll drop me a note and let me know where I might possibly see you somewhere along my itinerary. Any letter reaching the San Domenico Hotel, Taormina, Sicily, will find me there until April 6. After that, the Spyridon Makres Travel Agency in Athens (Churchill Street) will forward all my mail to me. Yours, K.C.S.”
    He hoped the postscript was clear enough, too. He would have been astounded to hear that it was the most important part of the whole letter.
    Then it was only a matter of finding the small notebook he had carried around with him during the war—it contained sketches, innocuous enough to avoid a censor’s disapproving eye, of people and places which had caught his imagination; and a scattering of addresses, of names now mostly half-forgotten. Christophorou’s address was jotted on the corner of his sketch of the distant Acropolis as he had watched it when he